Pages 398–410
The gala's longest stretch: Mario's film reaches Reconfiguration itself — toxic-horror headlines, then a puppet reconstruction of the closed-door "Concavity Cabinet" meeting where the befouled Northeast gets given away — and then the narration steps off-screen into E.T.A. lore, because the film's climactic blackmail plot alludes to a legend every E.T.A. viewer knows and you don't yet: Eric Clipperton, the junior who played with a gun. Twelve pages, half geopolitics in Popsicle-stick form, half tennis legend; the join between them is one headline.
Terms, in order of appearance
- LOVE CANAL (p. 398) — real 1970s disaster: a Niagara Falls neighborhood built on buried chemical waste.
- Luria P—— (p. 403) — Tine's mid-sentence slip, "what Lur—"; endnote 156 catches the name the film almost drops.
- Glock 17 (p. 407) — real Austrian 9mm pistol.
- puppet-à-clef (p. 407) — on roman à clef: real matters under thin fictional disguise.
- human radon (p. 407) — radon is the real radioactive gas that seeps up out of the ground; hence a player who rises from nowhere.
- U.S.T.A. (p. 408) — the real United States Tennis Association, keeper of the rankings computers.
- 'Ind.' (p. 409) — tournament-listing abbreviation: Independent, no academy affiliation.
After you read: three things
1. The Concavity is manufactured on screen. EPA softball games keep "stumbling on" drum-fields New Hampshire swears were planted; the Secretary of State's furious summary confirms the dumping was policy; the crafts-class map acquires its bite; and the gift comes with a catch — the U.S. keeps using the ceded land as its waste sink, "Interdependence is as Interdependence does" (p. 405), fans installed facing north. This is the grievance you've heard argued from the Canadian side since p. 311, shown being built — with Gentle reduced to oxygen-noises and Rodney Tine doing all the talking. And keep the p. 399 caveat in hand: with Himself's matte lab, "it's hard to tell which of the headlines... have been dickied with."
2. One headline fuses the book's two vocabularies. When Canada declines, Gentle threatens upside-down missiles and northward fans: "WILLING TO ELIMINATE OWN MAP OUT OF SHEER PIQUE" (p. 407). You've met map-elimination as suicide at p. 286 (Himself), p. 300 (de-mapping), p. 348 (AA's Bottom), and map-versus-territory as Eschaton's whole crisis (p. 333). Here the idiom goes national — and the text immediately tells you the plot is a "puppet-à-clef-type allusion" to a real E.T.A. legend.
3. Clipperton is suicide-blackmail with a ranking. The unseeded independent who plays with a Glock 17 at his own left temple and vows to fire if he ever loses — and therefore never loses, opponents hitting balls between their legs rather than carry his death, wins "by what is essentially psychic default" (p. 409). Notice the tense the text quietly uses — "the late Eric Clipperton" (p. 410) — and who his one friend on the circuit was: eight-year-old Mario, laughing at something Clipperton let slip. Endnote 160 is worth the flip: it says where the most disturbing footage ended up, and in whose casket.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.