Pages 528–530
"PRE-DAWN AND DAWN, 1 MAY Y.D.A.U." — the mountainside serial reaches actual morning. Steeply is arguing, by way of folk myths, that a pleasure that kills isn't some uniquely American weakness; Marathe parries; and between their exchanges the narration finally opens the serial's locked drawers — how many meetings there have been, who is fooling whom, and what each man is hiding. It's the most inward installment yet: a talking scene where the real events are all withheld information. Same two men, same outcropping, the desert brightening below.
Terms, in order of appearance
- M-o-r-t-s (p. 528) — Steeply spelling out French morts: dead. What the myth's young men end up.
- odalisque (p. 529) — real word: a harem concubine, a fixture of nineteenth-century painting; Québec's Odalisque de Sainte Thérèse is the book's myth.
- Medusa (p. 529) — the Greek original: behold her, turn to stone. The Odalisque runs the trade in reverse — beholders become gems.
- Sterling (p. 530) — real British submachine gun; the machine pistol that's been under Marathe's lap-blanket since p. 88.
- saguaro (p. 530) — the giant branching cactus of the real Sonora desert.
- wens (p. 530) — sebaceous skin cysts; what electrolysis has done to Steeply's jaw by dawn.
After you read: three things
1. The one secret nobody holds. The espionage onion gets peeled — sixth or seventh meeting, the A.F.R. believing Marathe a triple agent, Steeply withholding a fact from his own superiors just to hold something back. Under it all, the confession only you receive: Marathe "had reached the internal choice" that he loves his wife Gertraud "more than he loved the Separatist and anti-O.N.A.N. cause" (pp. 528–529). The price if Fortier learns: "a railroad spike through Gertraud's boneless right eye" — an image you have seen exactly once before, in the Antitois' back room (p. 485).
2. A laugh worth flipping for. Steeply's Odalisque — "A Medusa in reverse, one might say" — draws a strange beat: "Both men, well versed in this, mirthlessly laughed" (p. 529). Well versed in what? Endnote 223 says, and what it says reaches back toward a certain filmmaker's catalog (endnote 24). Flip for it; it's the scene's quiet payload.
3. The diagnosis, and the intimacy. Marathe returns Steeply's irony to sender: "This irony and contempt for selves. These also are part of your U.S.A. type's temptation, I think" (p. 529) — mockery not as defense against the fatal pleasure but as an ingredient of it. And notice the scene's plainest sentence: "The two men, by this juncture of time, each knew the other" (p. 530). On a night of forced hugs and family blankness, the enemies are the book's most honest pair.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.