Pages 620–626

E.T.A., Ennet House, and the A.F.R., cross-cut · first-time reader guide · all scenes

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

A gray mid-November weekday, Boston Public Gardens, and a change of altitude: the book goes essayistic for two full pages — a Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment tech-and-culture catalog — before any person appears. Then it settles on two: Rodney Tine, Chief of Unspecified Services, watching the annual draining of the duck pond from an eighth-floor State House Annex window (a silent official conclave, Steeply included, seated behind him), and the M.I.T. student engineer from Madame Psychosis's radio show, sunning his acne on a space blanket on the Gardens' far hillside. The essay-then-incident shape is deliberate; the incident is quick.

Terms, in order of appearance

spect-op (pp. 620–21) — public spectation opportunity; theorized here after flashing by on p. 611.
Gapers' Blocks (p. 620) — real term: traffic jams caused by rubbernecking.
Rodney Tine (p. 622) — Chief of the U.S. Office of Unspecified Services; "Rod the God" from pp. 92–93.
scopophile (p. 622) — real word: a lover of looking; applied to the late Dr. Incandenza.
Make Way for Ducklings (p. 623) — real Robert McCloskey picture book; the bronze ducklings really stand in the Public Garden.
WYYY-109 (p. 623) — M.I.T.'s student radio station, the one from pp. 181–193.
chyme (p. 624) — real word: partially digested stomach contents.
Miss Diagnosis (p. 624) — the crushing substitute for Madame Psychosis; endured since p. 449.
Brigham and Women's (p. 625) — real Boston hospital; where the ambulance went.
Q.v. (p. 625) — Latin quod vide, "which see"; the narration starts cross-referencing its own action like a reference work.

After you read: three things

1. The essay is the book talking in its own voice. "An entertainment-market of sofas and eyes" (p. 620), and its dialectical product: crowds desperate to stand live witness to anything at all. Note the shrug it dares you to share — "Saying this is bad is like saying traffic is bad" — and note that the midnight car-switch you just watched turn into gunfire (pp. 602–19) appears here, coolly, as one more spect-op.

2. You can finish the engineer's sentences. He knows only what Molly Notkin (the party host from pp. 219–240) let slip: Treatment, "only half a house" in a low-rent part of metro Boston (p. 625). You can complete both the term and the address. And when the narration says, flatly, "He is shortly to have occasion to wish he knew a great deal more" — a rare hard flash-forward on the page itself — read the white-van paragraphs with that sentence in your ear.

3. Everyone is watching the wrong thing. The op unfolds on the one hillside that faces away from the pond, copless because the Finest are at the draining; eight floors up, the country's chief secret-service officer gazes at concentric rings of crowd while the only event that matters dips out of his "specular vision" (p. 623). And the mask on the legless figure in the speeding chair — fleur-de-lis with sword stem (p. 625) — is one you have seen before, in a back room on pp. 484–487.

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