Pages 654–655
A page-long interruption: while the Hal-Stice first set plays out, the narration cuts away into seven quick panels — the first stamped "At just this moment," the early ones located in meters and clicks from the court — Gately asleep in his basement room (the midnight fight you've already read is still hours off), Poor Tony Krause in a library men's room, Pemulis and Struck in a pharmacy-school reference room, a green sedan in the E.T.A. lot, Charles Tavis groping under his own sofa, one sentence about Avril, and a long last panel in Phoenix. It's a clock-synchronizing device; read it as the book updating its map.
Terms, in order of appearance
- clicks (p. 655) — military slang: kilometers.
- Nunhagen (p. 655) — the aspirin outfit whose full-front ad wraps Steeply's cover sedan, now parked "Authorized Guest."
- endnote 266 (p. 655) — whom Tavis's appointments are with and how they end; effectively the montage's eighth panel, worth the flip.
- M.S.T. (p. 655) — Mountain Standard Time; the one panel stamped with its own zone.
After you read: three things
1. Every panel is armed with something you already hold. Poor Tony (last seen coming apart on pp. 299–307) "getting a whole new perspective on time" in a stall. Pemulis licking a finger through pharmacology reference pages — you know what compound he's been sitting on since pp. 211–215. Tavis groping for the bathroom scale he hides under the sofa. None of the panels explains itself; you're expected to supply the captions.
2. One person can't be located. In a device built to pin every character to coordinates and a shared instant, there is exactly one flat exception: "Avril Incandenza's whereabouts on the grounds were throughout this interval unknown" (p. 655). The sentence is doing something by being there at all.
3. Read the Phoenix panel against p. 599. The narration now writes 'Swiss' in quotation marks — adopting what you learned when the covers came back — and the wordless embrace, the hop, the forked legs over the shoulders replay the p. 567 choreography almost beat for beat, in "a different tall hotel (from before)." No talk, breath "somehow coded." Orin experiences a ritual; you've seen the purse.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.