Pages 380–386
Interdependence Day evening at E.T.A., hours after the Eschaton wreck and simultaneous with the AA meeting a few blocks west: the whole Academy, in mandatory festive hats and with dietary regulations suspended, gathers in the dining hall for the annual screening of Mario's untitled 48-minute puppet film — a kids'-show adaptation of his late father's ONANtiad, shot three summers back in a janitor closet with the willed head-mount Bolex. The pages alternate film synopsis with audience business; the film itself, jejune as it plays, is real exposition — take its history seriously.
Terms, in order of appearance
- ONANtiad (p. 380) — coinage on the Aeneid model: a founding-of-the-nation epic (the O.N.A.N. pun included).
- amanuentic (p. 381) — from amanuensis, one who takes dictation; somebody in the family helped with the screenplay.
- falcate (p. 381) — real anatomy word: sickle-shaped; Mario's digits, ideal for puppet-work.
- Howard Hughes (p. 382) — real billionaire recluse and germophobe; Gentle's hygiene terror is his grade.
- C.U.S.P. (p. 382) — the Clean U.S. Party, at last unpacked after p. 283's bare acronym.
- macrobiotic (p. 382) — real austerity diet-movement; one half of Gentle's odd coalition.
- Wurlitzer (p. 384) — real organ maker; Mrs. Clarke supplies the ominous D-minor.
- J.J.J.C. (p. 385) — the Canadian P.M.'s initials; the film never expands them.
- frappeurs (p. 386) — French, roughly "strikers, batterers"; who the Manitoban ones are goes unexplained.
- entr'acte (p. 386) — theater: a musical number between acts.
After you read: three things
1. This is the origin story you've been owed since p. 223. Sponsored years, "Experialism," Reconfiguration, the Gentle administration — all the era's furniture gets its founding here: a germophobe crooner elected by a country with no Foreign Menace left, promising a "Tighter, Tidier Nation" and asking citizens "to sit back and enjoy the show" (p. 383), then pounding the podium: there "just must be some people besides each other of us to blame," and he'll find "some cohesion-renewing Other" (p. 384). You heard Marathe quote that logic on p. 319; here's the source, in puppets.
2. The room stages the book's irony argument. Americans heckle in funny hats until thrown sweets give sterile Gentle "a sort of carbuncular look"; John Wayne and the Canadian kids sit unhatted and stolid — "This American penchant for absolution via irony is foreign to them" (p. 385), because they remember the ATHSCME fans blowing U.S. oxides north. Hours earlier and blocks away, an AA meeting declared itself an irony-free zone; the book has run both rooms on the same night.
3. Endnote 147 is where the day's plot actually moves. Flip it: Avril already knows about the Eschaton injuries; Tavis and Schtitt don't and won't till morning; she is arranging whose heads roll — pointedly not Hal's — and Tavis is sleepless over an impending visit from a certain Moment magazine journalist, which Avril herself lobbied for. The gala is the surface; the note is the machine.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.