Pages 787–795

E.T.A., Ennet House, and the A.F.R., cross-cut · first-time reader guide · all scenes

Endnote 332 arrives on page 795 — it gets its own page.

When you've finished these pages: three things worth a second look, at the bottom.

Molly Notkin's Cambridge co-op — the same rooms where her party ended with Joelle in the bathroom, pp. 219–240 — some days later in November. Technical interviewers from the U.S. Office of Unspecified Services, led by one Rodney Tine Jr., have picked the lock and sit the just-returned Notkin under a portable high-watt lamp, and she talks. After the setup, the whole scene is her testimony rendered as an itemized list of clauses ("—That..."), a deliberate deposition format. Plain heads-up: the testimony includes incest, an acid attack, and two suicides, retailed in lurid secondhand detail.

Terms, in order of appearance

A.B.D. (p. 787) — academic slang: "all but dissertation," a Ph.D. minus the finished thesis.
Rodney Tine Jr. (p. 787) — son of Unspecified Services chief Rodney Tine (p. 92); endnote 325: the lamp-and-lockpick tradecraft is copied from late-night noir films.
Sidney Peterson (p. 787) — real Bay Area avant-garde filmmaker; endnote 331 makes his tradition an ancestor of Himself's slapstick side.
Bolex H32 (p. 788) — movie camera whose three-lens turret gives "a kind of multi-eyed, alien-facial look" (endnote 327).
anamorphosized (p. 788) — distorted by a special lens, stretched or warped.
thanatoptic (p. 790) — death-gazing, from Greek thanatos; applied to the Auteur's widow's smile.
Wild Turkey (p. 790) — real Kentucky bourbon; here a turkey-shaped gift bottle with a cerise ribbon.
olla podrida (p. 791) — Spanish stew; figuratively, a hodgepodge.
Liebestod (p. 792) — German, "love-death"; opera-and-theory term for ecstasy fused with dying.
Gilles Deleuze (p. 792) — real French philosopher; the posthumous book Notkin cites is invented.
low-pH (p. 792) — chemistry: acidic; "the low-pH Daddy" is a Kentucky reagent chemist.
bradykinetic (p. 795) — medical: abnormally slow-moving.

After you read: three things

1. The fullest account of the Entertainment yet — from someone who never saw it. Notkin describes Madame Psychosis nude and hugely pregnant as "the archetypal figure Death," leaning over a crib's-eye camera with a strange wobbly lens, explaining "in very simple childlike language" that "Death is always female," that "the woman who kills you is always your next life's mother," and that a mother's frantic love is "amends for a murder neither of you quite remember." Then she insists the thing couldn't possibly be lethal — mere depressive conceits — while you have watched it empty rooms since the attaché's den on pp. 33–37. Hold both facts at once.

2. Grade the testimony as you go. She gives Madame Psychosis's "real name" as Lucille Duquette — you've known her as Joelle van Dyne since p. 219 — and endnote 329 shows the operatives silently letting another confident claim pass as "complete horseshit." One more thing worth noticing: this co-op is the brownstone Joelle "had lived in once with Orin and performed in with his father" (p. 227) — they are asking where the Master is in rooms where his films got made.

3. The Thanksgiving acid story arrives at maximum detail, minimum reliability. The Daddy's table confession, the mother's flask from the cellar acid-lab, Orin's reflexive duck, Joelle's face taking the hit, the garbage-disposal suicide that evening — all of it thirdhand, from a witness who wasn't there and gets checkable facts wrong. You already have Joelle from the inside (pp. 219–240, 588–593); weigh Notkin's grand-guignol version against her.

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