Pages 906–911
Still Viewing Room 5, still the blizzard morning, Hal still flat on the shag — now beside the wall-case of Himself's own cartridges. The week's missing man finally appears: Pemulis, unshaved, one eye twitching, who urgently wants to go "someplace discreet and really interface." Freer and McKenna stick their heads in with grotesque bulletins about what Stice's forehead left on the upstairs window. First person throughout, and the narration keeps splicing in, unannounced, a memory of Himself's funeral in Québec — let it interleave; the splice is the scene's form.
Terms, in order of appearance
- tu-savez-quoi (p. 908) — mangled French for "you-know-what" (properly tu sais quoi).
- Zorro (p. 909) — the real masked pulp hero; Stice's post-infirmary facial bandaging, per Freer.
- Ocean Spray (p. 910) — the real cranberry cooperative; day job of Himself's stock actor Paul Anthony Heaven.
- the lecture's jargon (p. 911) — endnote 366: clinamen, tessera, kenosis — parody of Harold Bloom, the real critic of poets wrestling their dead precursors.
- The Cage (p. 911) — Sidney Peterson's real avant-garde film, "mostly about a peripatetic eyeball" (endnote 366), running behind the lectern.
After you read: three things
1. The anhedonia files another report. "It occurred to me that I didn't have to eat if I was not hungry. This presented itself as almost a revelation." Even answering a simple question now requires running a response-tree so enormous Hal chooses "almost at random." Watch that condition shape the whole scene — including its last line, after the film: "Then this too began to seem familiar."
2. Pemulis can't get his sentence out. "When have I ever urgently asked you to dialogue before, Inc?" — and Hal deflects every approach: declares the DMZ "synthetic bacchanal" definitely off, invokes their thirty-day mullah's-babe urine pact, forbids "temptation-rhetoric," and cuts off "Blarney wasn't why we got it, Inc, is the thing" mid-thought. If you flipped endnote 332 back at p. 795, you know what happened to Pemulis on the 17th and Hal doesn't; count how many times the scene lets the news almost arrive.
3. The son reviews the father. Browsing the case (Baby Pictures of Famous Dictators, Fun with Teeth, the case mislabeled Annular Fusion Is Our Fiend), Hal cues the last five minutes of Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms...: Paul Anthony Heaven delivering a stupefying lecture in a grave monotone to dead-eyed doodling students — "and yet all the time weeping... very steadily." The critics called Himself hostile to audiences; Hal registers instead "the incredible pathos" of the weeping monotone. Interleaved: the funeral itself — the gull's direct hit on C.T.'s blazer, the fly into his open mouth, the grave-mound "airy and risen and plump, like dough," and "The Moms probably laughed hardest of anyone."
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.