Pages 548–549

Randy Lenz, out at night · first-time reader guide · all scenes

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

"EARLY NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT," and a register you haven't had yet: dry intelligence-dossier prose, hung on Rodney Tine — Chief of Unspecified Services, the "Rod the God" of the Mario-film pages — newly dispatched to metro Boston. No scene, no dialogue: two pages of the U.S. government's file on the lethal cartridge, opening (and closing) with the one blackmailable fact about Tine himself. It reads like a briefing because it is one; let the deadpan do its work.

Terms, in order of appearance

pithed (p. 548) — real lab term: destroying a frog's brain with a needle before dissection. The dossier's word for the victims' state.
C.D.C. (p. 548) — the real Centers for Disease Control; the samizdat gets treated as an outbreak.
the Famous Crooner (p. 549) — no mystery intended: the singer currently occupying the White House.
Leavenworth (p. 549) — real federal/military prison in Kansas; source of the "volunteer" test subjects.
the samizdat (p. 549) — now the intelligence community's official name; Steeply reached for the same Russian word back on p. 91.
P.E.T. (p. 549) — real brain-scan tech (positron-emission tomography); the scans that rule out hypnosis and dopamine surges.
Franklin-Planner (p. 549) — real leather day-planner; the disguise for Tine's charting notebook.
A.A.O.A.A. (p. 549) — the Anti-Anti-O.N.A.N. Activities' Agency; the stacked negatives are the joke, and endnote 229 stacks another.

After you read: three things

1. Storylines you watched, now as statistics. The Berkeley cascade — scholar, companion, two cops, six cops, watch sergeant: seventeen before anyone thought to kill the power. Then "a diplomatically immune Near Eastern medical attaché and a dozen incidentals here in Boston MA late last spring" (p. 548) — that's the recliner-and-viewer apartment you've been inside since p. 33, tallied in casualty-report prose. The end-state gets its canonical description here: "Docile and continent but blank, as if on some deep reptile-brain level pithed."

2. The only eyewitness frames. A Leavenworth Lance Corporal under electrodes reports what the thing opens with before he's lost: "a veiled woman going through a large building's revolving doors," her veil billowing at the sight of someone (p. 549). It's the first actual content anyone has produced. You have also, very recently, spent a pre-dawn hour with a veiled woman (pp. 531–538). The dossier doesn't connect them; the adjacency is the book's move, and the noticing is yours.

3. The ruler. The file on the surveillance state's chief opens with his locked-drawer metric ruler and the daily measurement he's performed "since twelve; still does" (p. 548), and its last line is "Rodney Tine, his retinue, and his ruler." An entire psyche delivered as one habit, bracketing a national-security crisis. Watch how much characterization the book can do inside briefing-speak.

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