Pages 774–782

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.

A Cambridge jazz club, night, November 14, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment. Two strangers at the bar after the music: a bruised young woman drinking the first alcohol of her life, and a legless man in a wheelchair who says "I call myself Rémy" and claims to be Swiss. Like the last Hal–Mario scene, this is pure unattributed dialogue; the man's Frenchified English ("You are in the chair even if you do not prefer it") is characterization, not a misprint. Fair warning, folded in plainly: the conversation is largely about suicide, depression, and a dying wife.

Terms, in order of appearance

Kahlua and milk (p. 775) — coffee liqueur cut with milk; "novocaine of the soul" is her verdict on it.
Ryle's Inman Square Club of Jazz (p. 775) — a real Cambridge jazz club (Ryles, in Inman Square).
the Big Book (p. 775) — Alcoholics Anonymous's basic text; its drink-hidden-in-a-glass-of-milk story is the joke her order re-enacts.
Kenbeck pacemaker (p. 776) — his father's heart device, fatally scrambled by a misdialed cellular call from Trois Rivières.
Anschluss (p. 777) — real-world: Nazi Germany's 1938 annexation of Austria, staged as friendly union; the comparison is Marathe's own.
Autoroute (p. 778) — French: expressway; here a "Provincial" Autoroute.
schüssching (p. 778) — from skiing's schuss: a straight, brakeless, full-speed downhill run.
Mont Papineau (p. 779) — no Swiss peak by this name; Papineau is a Québec name (the patriote Louis-Joseph Papineau).
restenosis (p. 780) — medical: progressive re-narrowing of blood vessels; "progressive decays of circulation and vessel."
Jaarvik IX Exterior Artificial Heart (p. 781) — after the real Jarvik artificial hearts; a "Jarvik IX" figured in the Moment-magazine item on pp. 142–144.

After you read: three things

1. You know both of them; they don't know each other. The woman is Kate Gompert — the psych-ward interview of pp. 68–78; the "billowing shaped black sailing wing" she names here is the shape Geoffrey Day described and she recognized on pp. 649–650; and the street mugging of pp. 716–719 is why she's bruised, purseless, and off Ennet House grounds. The man is Marathe, from the Arizona mountainside. On p. 776 he confesses outright — "I am spending a day to find someone I think my friends will kill, all the time I am awaiting the chance to betray my friends" — and Kate, getting drunk, doesn't register a word. You're the only one at the table who knows who's talking.

2. "Switzerland" is a mask worn thin on purpose. Legless friends, legs lost "being struck by a train," a homeland despoiled "on paper" by a huge neighbor calling annexation a gift, Mont Papineau, Trois Rivières — the autobiography matches the Québec and A.F.R. material you've had since pp. 88–93 and the train-cult legend of endnote 304, relabeled. By p. 781 the cover drops entirely: "the A.F.R., my companions." Kate never notices; the scene lets you watch the truth said aloud to someone who can't hear it.

3. The closing offer is not hypothetical. Marathe's life story argues that what freed him from the "cage of the self" was one unthinking choice of another person over his own pain — "It chains me, but the chains are of my choice." Then he turns and asks Kate what she'd say to something "only three streets from here" promising "more good feeling and pleasure than ever before" and the end of all sorrow. That promise sounds exactly like the Entertainment he has spent the day tracking — and the scene ends on his unanswered "Yes?"

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