Pages 418–430
The longest mountainside installment yet: still the night of 30 April / 1 May, Marathe not-quite-sleeping in his practiced hover, Steeply freezing in the sleeveless dress and ruined heels, the bonfire and waste-barges of the desert floor below. This is the serial's philosophical main event — twelve pages of argument about freedom, pleasure, and what a government can owe people it has promised not to tell what to want. The register swings between deadpan comedy (feet, wigs, a fart cushion-muffled mid-debate) and the book's plainest political speech; both are load-bearing.
Terms, in order of appearance
- Taurus PT9 (p. 419) — real Brazilian 9mm pistol; taped, unsafetied, to Steeply's inner thigh — hence his refusal to sit.
- the fantods (p. 420) — old American slang: the creeps, the willies.
- aminotetralin (p. 420) — real drug-chemistry family; endnote 169 glosses the "Happy Patches" trade Steeply once infiltrated.
- Montcalmists (p. 421) — invented cell named for Montcalm, the real French general who lost Québec in 1759.
- utilitarienne (p. 423) — utilitarianism, in French: the real greatest-pleasure-over-pain moral calculus.
- Habitant soupe aux pois (p. 424) — real Québec brand of pea soup; a habitant is an old-time Québécois settler.
- the Public Garden (p. 427) — real Boston park; the duck pond and willows of Marathe's reverie are as described.
- Barges of Land (p. 428) — the waste convoys visible below, bound partly for Mexico, mostly for launch into the Convexity.
After you read: three things
1. Listen to Steeply risk corniness. What gives U.S.O.U.S. "the fantods" is the A.F.R.'s agendaless malice — no demand, no "third thing" to negotiate, "just getting the Entertainment out there to hurt us" (pp. 420–22). Pressed for what Americans positively want, Steeply answers in dead earnest: freedom from tyranny, meaningful work, "Frozen yogurt. A tall lemonade on a squeak-free porch swing" (p. 423). After the irony-free-zone pages you've just read, you can hear exactly what register he's daring to use, in lipstick, on a ledge, to an enemy.
2. The soup can is the addiction chapters in political dress. One Single-Serving can of Habitant soupe aux pois, two ravenous sacred selves: Marathe's parable grinds Steeply's catechism down to "How am I able to think past this soup to the future of soup down my road?" (p. 428) — delayed gratification as the whole problem of the polity, with the waste-barge version ("saddle him with my greed's waste") floating literally below. Steeply's last line of defense is the American crux stated clean: education exists "Not to teach what to desire. To teach how to be free."
3. The trap closes on a question, and the bodies keep it honest. If the first viewing is a free choice sacred to the self, why is a freely-chooseable film a national emergency? "But to decide to be this pleasurably entertained in the first place. This is still a choice, no?... No? Yes?" (p. 430) ends the installment unanswered. And the scene never lets the abstraction float free: Steeply's blistered "supposedly female feet" and needed humiliations; Marathe hovering over himself "as does a spectator at popcorn" (p. 419); the wife fourteen months comatose; two older brothers who "kissed trains head-on before reaching marriageable age" (p. 428).
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.