Pages 711–714

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.

Still E.T.A. Viewing Room 6, same 11 November study period, same crowd as pp. 701–706: this is Blood Sister: One Tough Nun's third act, narrated more or less straight through with the room's reactions riding alongside. The saved punker girl is found dead in her cot, and the film goes fully splattery from there. The scene is nearly all plot summary — deliberately: you're watching Hal watch his father's genre machinery run to its finish, cringes and all, before the room's attention snaps back to E.T.A. business in the final paragraph.

Terms, in order of appearance

demapping (pp. 711–712) — the street idiom for killing you've had since the yrstruly and Lenz scenes (pp. 128ff, 538ff), here worn as genre-pastiche.
potassium thiocyanate (p. 711) — endnote 296 gives the real recipe: mixed 5-to-1 with ferric chloride it makes 'A + B Blood,' low-budget splatter's staple.
Bing Crosby / Bing (p. 712) — the slang for cocaine running through the Ennet-world scenes since pp. 307ff; here "Colombian freebaseable-grade."
Confiteor (p. 712) — the Catholic confession prayer ("I confess..."); the girl's suspicious fluency in it becomes a clue.
habitements (p. 712) — coinage: habits as combat-wear, swirling through the fight scene.
Champlain-era (pp. 712–713) — Samuel de Champlain, French founder of colonial Canada, early 1600s; dates the souvenir tomahawk.
tympanum (p. 713) — architecture: the carved panel above a doorway.
CONTRARIA SUNT COMPLEMENTA (p. 713) — real Latin motto, "opposites are complementary" (Niels Bohr put it on his coat of arms); endnote 298's E.T.A. connection is worth the flip.

After you read: three things

1. The plot is a salvation-chain rotting from inside. Every nun was saved by a nun she repays by saving another — and Act III's revelation is that a link was never really saved at all: twenty years of hidden relapse, dealing out of the Rescue Mission's confessionals. You just heard the real version of this chain working, in the CA speaker's story of pp. 707–711 and Gately's Crocodiles before that. The film is that structure's nightmare: what if your saviour was secretly still Out There? Endnote 289 (p. 704) already told you how personally the filmmaker meant it.

2. The ending refuses the circle, under a motto. Handed the tomahawk and invited to "complete the lapsarian circuit or whatever," Blood Sister shrugs, drops it, and walks out under a tympanum carved with sword, ploughshare, syringe, soup-ladle, and CONTRARIA SUNT COMPLEMENTA (p. 713) — symbolism so heavy Hal cringes and Boone has to translate for Blott. The last shot aims her at a discount Harley-muffler sign on the horizon, lapse-or-not left "unclear in a way that's supposed to be rich."

3. The final paragraph opens two doors in one breath. "Out of nowhere Hal remembers: Smothergill" (p. 714) — the name that's been stuck behind his teeth since pp. 686ff (endnote 279), surfacing the moment his father's cartridge ends. And the tunnel boys — whose disciplinary shit-detail you followed at pp. 666–673 — announce they've come about "something disturbing" they found down there. Hal holds up a hand and keeps flipping cartridge cases. The deferral is the joke; the scene ends on it.

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