Pages 666–673
Still 11 November, 4:25 p.m. — twenty-six meters under the match you've been watching. The sub-14 boys implicated-but-uninjured in the Eschaton debacle (Chu with the clipboard, Gopnik, Tallat-Kelpsa, Traub, Peterson, Whale, McKenna, plus ten-year-old tagalong Kent Blott) are working a semi-punitive trash detail through E.T.A.'s tunnel system, bagging eight years of detritus by flashlight while the applause overhead "sounds down here like faraway rain." The detail doubles as a Tunnel Club expedition: Blott claims he saw a rat — or "what looked even more like a Concavitated feral hamster" — and the Club badly wants it to be true.
Terms, in order of appearance
- Glad Handle-Tie bags (p. 666) — endnote 270 supplies the manufacturer's full, unfortunate corporate name; a one-line flip.
- Robert's Rules (p. 667) — the real parliamentary-procedure manual; the Club's yellowed copy governs mostly membership amendments.
- Concavitated (p. 668) — coinage: rendered monstrous by the Great Concavity.
- Pledge (p. 669) — real furniture polish; limb-shaped husks of it line the tunnel seams, and "incongruous cans" of it sat in the bleacher gear bags on p. 662.
- "Piranha of the Plains" (p. 670) — the feral hamster's folkloric epithet.
- Orkin (p. 672) — real extermination company; the grounds get saturation-bombed twice a semester.
After you read: three things
1. The first words answer a hanging question. "Carved out of sedimentary shale and ferrous granite and generic morphic crud..." (p. 666) — the reply, across the interposed letters, to Steeply's "Carved out of what, though, this place?" from p. 662. The scene then inventories what E.T.A. actually sits on: prorectors' quarters, Physical Plant, storage — and "Dr. James Incandenza's old optics and editing facilities." The campus is stacked, and the book wants you holding both levels at once.
2. Audit the boys' theory against your own file. They want a hamster because it would justify the Club, deflect post-Eschaton reprisals from Pemulis, Hal, and Axford — and explain the "occult" object-appearances (August's lobby full of practice balls, the dawn AminoPal pyramid) that the best table wouldn't discuss on pp. 631–33: hamsters being "notorious draggers and rearrangers of stuff they can't eat but feel compelled to fuck with anyway" (p. 671). Note what else sits on their bogey list — "skull-deprived wraiths" — and note the "strange sweet stale burny smell" near the Pump Room "that none of them can place" (p. 669). You can place it: pp. 49–54.
3. The fridge is a committee meeting with Death. The find, the quorum on the smell, the delegated opening, and the exchange that follows — "So why's that sandwich-meat moving?"; "This is Death. Woe unto those that gazeth on Death. The Bible" (pp. 672–73) — before the rout: "High receding voices, bobbing lights." Blott's meek closing hypothesis is the scene's punchline; don't miss it in the stampede.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.