Pages 430–434

Interdependence Day evening — Mario's movie · first-time reader guide · all scenes

When you've finished these pages: three things worth a second look, at the bottom.

This picks up the Eric Clipperton legend exactly where pp. 407–410 left it: the unaffiliated junior who never lost because he played every point with a Glock to his own head. You're in E.T.A. lore-flashback mode — the story runs from Clipperton's last pre-Subsidized season into the Year of the Whopper, when Subsidized Time and O.N.A.N. arrive — and everyone here you've already met: Clipperton, Mario, James Incandenza ("Himself"), Lyle from the weight room. Fair warning, folded in plainly: the legend ends in this scene, with a suicide witnessed at close range.

Terms, in order of appearance

Glock 9 mm. / Glock 17 (p. 430) — real Austrian semiautomatic pistol; Clipperton's court-side companion since p. 408.
O.N.A.N.T.A. (p. 431) — the continental tennis association that absorbed the old U.S.T.A. once O.N.A.N. formed.
NAJT / North American Junior Tennis (p. 431) — the new trilingual ranking biweekly; its computer, not any referee, makes Clipperton official.
vig (p. 431) — bookmaker's built-in percentage; how Pemulis profits on the locker-room wagering.
psychic cuirass (p. 431) — cuirass: real word, a breastplate; armor for the torso.
portcullis (p. 431) — a fortress's heavy drop-gate; E.T.A.'s front entrance, spiked with wrought-iron racquet heads.
fantods (p. 432) — the horrified creeps; "the howling fantods" has been house idiom since about p. 45.
Bolex H128 (p. 432) — real 16 mm. movie camera; the head-clamped rig Mario films with (p. 314).
delotusing (p. 432) — Lyle unfolding from his lotus position atop the towel dispenser (pp. 127–128).
bradykinetic (p. 433) — medical: abnormally slow of movement; Mario's motor condition.
eradicates his map (p. 433) — street idiom for killing; "eliminate their own map" was glossed as suicide on p. 220.
votaried (p. 434) — from votary: one bound by religious vows; a devotee's kind of self-transcendence.

After you read: three things

1. One clause holds the whole mechanism. Mid-p. 431: the Glock tactic "kept the wins, and in a way Clipperton himself, from being treated as real." Then a new O.N.A.N.T.A. data-cruncher who "knew from exactly zilch except for crunching raw results-data" makes the ranking real — and two days later Clipperton is at the portcullis, wrecked. On p. 433 the narration says he blows his "legitimated" brains out: that one word carries the entire causality. Read the scene as the answer to why being made official destroys him.

2. An "I" surfaces in the communal voice. This reads like collective E.T.A. legend — until p. 432, where the narrator says Incandenza Sr. is someone "of whom I think we can presume Mario's spoken glowingly." Someone specific is telling you this story. The page never says who; just register that the voice has a first person in it.

3. Watch what Mario carries. Mario talks Clipperton through the gate, sits in with his head-clamped Bolex running (Himself's condition), and afterward never tells Hal or the Moms what he saw — then insists on cleaning the room himself, all night, falling and picking himself up. The scene's weight sits with its smallest, gentlest witness; the locked "Clipperton Suite" is what the school does with that weight.

Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.