Pages 436–442

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.

Still the Interdependence Day gala, 8 Nov. Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment: Mario's puppet film is running long and the dining hall is sugar-crashing. The scene opens as E.T.A. lore — a second, even ghastlier case in the Clipperton vein — then returns to the screen for a headline montage and a Cabinet meeting rendered as an actual screenplay: ALL-CAPS speakers, bracketed stage directions. That format shift is the film's transcript, not a printing error. Everyone here you know; the Cabinet are puppets. The lore section is gruesome played as farce, on purpose.

Terms, in order of appearance

Nestlé's Quik (p. 436) — real instant chocolate-milk powder; NaCN is sodium cyanide, which the draftsman father keeps for ink.
dewimpled Carmelite (p. 437) — Carmelites: real Catholic order of nuns; dewimpled = out of the habit. This one works E.T.A.'s kitchen.
orts (p. 438) — genuine English: scraps of leftover food.
acromegalic (p. 438) — real disorder: runaway growth hormone, enlarged head and limbs.
Experialist (p. 438) — from "experialism," the giving-territory-away inversion of imperialism; the coinage has circulated since p. 59.
Veals Associates (p. 440) — P. Tom Veals, Boston ad man; Veals is half the agency name from the pp. 411–416 advertising history.
Tootsie-Pop-stick (p. 440) — real lollipop; the stick is Veals's whole puppet body.
pulchritudinous (p. 440) — Latinate for beautiful.
whinge (p. 441) — British/Canadian for complain; the scene glosses it as a running joke.
Cerberus (p. 441) — myth: the three-headed hound of Hades. Heads, not horns; the horns are Gentle's.
Ken-L-Ration, Magnavox, Kemper (p. 442) — all real brands: dog food, televisions, insurance.

After you read: three things

1. The Fresno kid, and who counsels at E.T.A. Pages 436–437 tell junior tennis's worst case of getting what you trained for — the Pacific Coast Hardcourts winner, the cyanide Quik, and a family of eight CPR-trained rescuers each "dead as a rivet," narrated as pure slapstick. Watch where it lands: this is why academies must staff a counselor, which sets up the demolition of Dr. Dolores Rusk — and the quiet list of who actually does the work, ending "and many times Avril herself."

2. The punter has no name; you have one. Gentle comes back from a Clemson–Boston U. bowl game raving not about football but about "one slim cat with an outsized leg": "I ate an entire wiener stem to stern while one punt was in the air" (p. 439). His "What was that cat's name again, R.T.?" never gets answered. You've known a B.U. punter with that leg for hundreds of pages; the placing is yours.

3. The calendar you've been reading gets invented. The Triple Bind — spending demanded, taxes forbidden, balance required — meets the Szechuan zodiac placemats and the bowl game's new name (p. 442), and the scheme that sells naming rights to time itself is conceived on-screen. Every year-header you've navigated since p. 3 traces to this joke. The audience even catches the film in a dating wobble (p. 438); the book lets them.

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