Pages 508–527

Pre-dawn, 1 May — the mountainside · first-time reader guide · all scenes

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

10 November, two days after Eschaton: Hal, Pemulis, Axford, and Kittenplan wait outside Tavis's office to answer for it. Hal is fresh from a tooth extraction, half his face numb, checking manually for drool. That's the whole frame — a long wait, an August flashback in the middle, then the door. What fills it is the book's fullest tour of E.T.A.'s administrative family, conducted almost entirely by overhearing: Avril's office next door has no door, so her under-13 girls' welfare interviews pour into the room while the four sit rehearsing their defense. Trust the digressions; they're the payload.

Terms, in order of appearance

felo de se (p. 510) — Latin legalism: suicide, literally "felon of himself"; how the narration keeps naming Himself's death (since p. 286).
Delco (p. 512) — real car-battery brand; the juice behind fifteen-year-old Pemulis's doorknob prank, still in litigation.
sinistral (p. 512) — left-handed; Axford, whose mangled right hand made it official.
sub rosa (p. 515) — Latin: in secret; how all E.T.A. punishment-sadism is kept.
Coatlicue Complex (p. 516) — Coatlicue: real Aztec mother goddess. Endnote 216, in its entirety: "No clue."
SkyDome (p. 516) — Toronto's real stadium, whose field-facing hotel rooms really did produce visible-from-the-stands incidents; Tavis's professional disgrace.
Meniscus Optical (p. 519) — endnote 218: Himself's mirror company and a warning-label joke that doubles as a Tavis field-guide; worth the flip.
aphasiac (p. 524) — aphasia: word-retrieval failure; here performed, part of Avril's snapping-fingers routine.
cardioid (p. 527) — mathematics: a heart-shaped closed curve; what Tavis's hands make of a giant paper clip.

After you read: three things

1. Hal's tell. Buried in the August flashback: Hal realizes he never thought to arrange supper with Stice — "he knew suddenly that he was going to go down and get high in secret in the Pump Room" (p. 521). Preferring the solitary high to company is a diagnostic his Ennet House counterparts, forty pages back, would name on sight. The scene lets Hal half-see it; watch how fast he files it away.

2. Avril, at the room's exact center. The Politeness Roulette pages (p. 523): "to report any sort of need or problem is to mug her," and Orin's image of her carrying her own feelings "with an arm around the feelings' windpipe and a Glock 9 mm. to the feelings' temple like a terrorist with a hostage, daring you to shoot." The scene shows the machinery working on Hal in real time — the apple he eats while "pretending to pretend his reluctance... was a pretense," and the bind of p. 524: "Is it showing off if you hate it?"

3. The second Tavis. The comic Tavis babbles a seven-year-old into tears — "we will take apart your skull very gently... a slight concave dent where the fear-instinct used to be" (pp. 520–521). But when genuinely threatened he goes still and "seems, perspectivally, to grow... dopplering in at a whisper" (pp. 526–527). The closing tableau — Lord with the monitor's glass at his throat, the paper clip bent into a cardioid, a hidden urologist asked quietly to close both doors — belongs to the second one.

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