Pages 638–648

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.

The caps header snaps you across the continent and the calendar: 1 MAY Y.D.A.U., the Tucson mountainside — the Marathe-and-Steeply night that's been arriving in installments since p. 87 has reached dawn. Just the two of them, as always. The body of the scene is one long personal anecdote from Steeply, the least guarded thing he's said all night: how his own father, a heating-oil dispatcher in Troy NY, was consumed "sometime around midlife" by a plain broadcast television program — MAS*H — with Marathe supplying dry one-line diagnoses from his wheelchair.

Terms, in order of appearance

annular pallor (p. 638) — annular = ring-shaped; the untanned band where a wedding ring was.
MAS*H (p. 639) — real CBS series, 1972–83, set in a Korean War field hospital; it ran nearly four times as long as the war. Per young Steeply: "an acronym, not a command."
Capital District (p. 639) — real name for the Albany–Troy– Schenectady region of New York.
Knights of Columbus (p. 640) — real Catholic fraternal order; one of the things the father quietly drops.
Betamixer (p. 642) — mangled Betamax, the real videotape format; endnote 263 rides it.
Major Burns / "Maury Linville" (p. 643) — Frank Burns, the show's petty villain; the real actor was Larry Linville — the text's first name is as printed.
Police Action (p. 644) — the Korean War's real official euphemism; the show outlived its war by years.
baroquoco (p. 644) — coinage: baroque plus rococo.
transmural infarction (p. 646) — real cardiology: a heart attack through the muscle's full thickness.

After you read: three things

1. The anecdote is the whole night's argument, made flesh. No samizdat, no technology — just "The gradual immersion. The withdrawal from life" (p. 640): the Thursday ritual, then syndication, then "the secrecy about the secrecy" (p. 641), the family reorganizing around the den ("The organism of family simply shifted to accommodate"), and a death in the easy chair "at full Recline" (p. 646). You have been looking at a man fixed in a recliner since p. 33. The appetite, Steeply's story says, long predates the weapon.

2. Watch Marathe watching. The serial began with his shadow cast gigantic over the desert (p. 88); at dawn he checks and finds it "pathetic and small" (p. 641). He can't decide whether this younger-seeming Steeply is real or "performance" — and notice that even mid-confession Steeply pauses to hand over his father's name and employer as "a tidbit" for Marathe's superiors. Candor here still travels through channels.

3. Slow down for the eyes, then trust the join. Asked about the Entertainment's victims, Steeply refuses the official phrase and gropes: "Stuck. Fixed. Held. Trapped. As in trapped in some sort of middle. Between two things. Pulled apart in different directions" (p. 647). Sit with that sentence. And when the exchange then seems to slide into other voices without a section break, that's the book's doing, not a printing error — let it carry you.

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