Pages 729–736
The halfway-house canvass of pp. 726–728 arrives at its last stop of the day: Rémy Marathe — veiled, blanket-lapped, machine pistol holstered to his stump — sits in the Ennet House living room on group-intake night, waiting to plead for admission while an authority interviews applicants behind the locked Office door. The scene opens cold, mid-dialogue, two unnamed women comparing the cults they were in before the needle; stay with it — the room assembles around you. Everything is filtered through Marathe's translated-French idiom and a spy's inventory-taking eye.
Terms, in order of appearance
- demi-maison (p. 730) — the cell's French for halfway house, carried over from p. 726.
- fauteuil de rollent (p. 730) — wheelchair; the term (and its one-word endnote) go back to p. 88.
- inutile (p. 730) — French: useless; the slumped woman parked by the cartridge viewer.
- U.H.I.D. (p. 731) — the veil-wearing Union you know from pp. 225ff; note whose organization Marathe calls it: "the Entertainment's performer's."
- "Pet the dogs" (p. 731) — whispered applicant-to-applicant advice; the scene leaves it as undecoded for you as for Marathe.
- trans-3-methyl-2 hexenoic acid (pp. 732, 734) — real compound reported in the sweat of severe mental illness; Broullîme's surveillance-lecture trivia, put to use.
- Le Culte du Prochain Train (p. 732) — "the Cult of the Next Train," named here as what ended Marathe's four-limbed childhood; endnote 304 tells the story — worth the flip.
- your six (p. 733) — military slang: the space behind you. Marathe, experimentally: "I have no six."
After you read: three things
1. The room is the book's whole cast of damage, unlabeled. The cult duet ("I finally felt too cleansed to stay... Plus I was up to three bags a day, at the end," p. 730), the eye in the mouth, the scuttling man under the jumping game — and "a man without hands and feet trying to negotiate the stairway," whom you may recognize from the White Flag meetings of pp. 375ff. Marathe logs it all without names; you get to supply them.
2. The disguise works because of where he's wearing it. Nobody in this room finds a veil or a wheelchair worth a glance — the one place his cover is invisible is a house where deformity is unremarkable. He wears dead Desjardins's turtleneck, recites "Good night, I am addicted and deformed, seeking residential treatment for addiction, desperately," and notes his credo in passing: "prepared to die violently at any time, which rendered him free to choose among emotions" (p. 732) — the mountainside doctrine of pp. 87ff, operationalized. And note what his inventory turns up: "No other in the room wore the veil" (p. 731). You know who sleeps upstairs in this very House tonight, veil tucked between pillow and jaw (pp. 723–724).
3. Selwyn's cosmology is solipsism's terminal case. The goat-smelling man with "the vacant intensity of those who have violently died" whispers his system: everyone is metal under a micro-thin organic layer, the real people are all in one room being shown projections, and there are exactly 26 machines playing everyone you've ever known — "You ain't here" (pp. 733–735). Against it, Marathe's rehearsed script ("I am Swiss") keeps firing on schedule: two prepared texts, neither hearing the other. The exit lines — "Physically challenged foreign person with unpronounceable name!" and "Make sure and pet the dogs!" — send him into the Office on a wave of pure American idiom.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.