Pages 938–941
A debriefing, rendered as a transcript with the interviewer's side deleted — every "Q." is a question you reconstruct from the answer it got. The voice is Joelle's; the questioner is the operative who stopped her on the sidewalk on p. 934; place and room go unstated. It's 20 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment. The answers-only format is deliberate, and not new to you: the book has used the same suppressed-question style in endnotes 234 and 269. Read the "Q."s as prompts and the scene plays itself.
Terms, in order of appearance
- Q. (p. 938) — the interviewer's questions, redacted; same house style as the endnote-234 and -269 interviews.
- epicene (p. 939) — of indeterminate sex; she glosses it herself: "Hermaphroditic. Androgynous."
- auto-wobble (p. 939) — Jim's name for the lens's built-in ball-and-socket wobble; his coinage, explained only here.
- catadioptric lens (p. 939) — real optics: a lens-and-mirror design, notably fat in the barrel; her point of comparison.
- Leith (p. 939) — Disney Leith, the E.T.A. film prorector; on Jim's shoots, "Leith was cameras."
- neonatal nystagmus (p. 940) — real term: the involuntary eye-wobble of newborns; what the lens was built to reproduce.
- Masters (p. 940) — master copies: the source cartridges a release is duplicated from.
- the Medusa-Odalisk thing (p. 941) — The Medusa v. the Odalisque, the Jim film you watched an audience watch on pp. 528–530.
- annulation-zone (p. 941) — the Great Concavity: the annular-fusion waste territory ceded northward.
After you read: three things
1. The closest look inside the Entertainment you have ever gotten. Joelle was in exactly two scenes: a glass revolving door in which she and a stranger whirl endlessly, each trying to follow the other, and a crib's-eye scene — camera bolted in a bassinet, Joelle in a white gown leaning over it delivering "at least twenty minutes of permutations of 'I'm sorry'" (p. 939). What drove it, she insists, was the wobbling, milky, eye-stalk lens built to mimic an infant's visual field: "My face wasn't important" (p. 940).
2. Hold this against Molly Notkin. The same services got a secondhand version of all this on pp. 788–795. Joelle's firsthand one disagrees on nearly everything: "Not exactly veiled" (p. 939); the "too perfect" doctrine was an ironic in-joke at her own lethal-beauty pose, borrowed from the Medusa-Odalisk film (p. 941); and the death — "He'd stopped being drunk all the time. That killed him. He couldn't take it but he'd made a promise" (p. 940). Notice what survives both testimonies, and what doesn't.
3. The last answer is a map, said out loud to the U.S. government. The Masters of everything unreleased were "buried with him" (p. 940), and "Where he's buried is itself buried, now. It's in your annulation-zone. It's not even your territory" (p. 941). If graves and digging ring a faint bell: Gately's fever-dream four pages back (pp. 933–34) had a very sad kid, a graveyard, and something "buried in the guy's head," and Hal's very first chapter remembered digging up his father's head with a man named Gately (p. 17). The scene asserts nothing about those; the placing is yours.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.