Endnote 324 (from page 787)

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

You were sent here from page 787 — when you're done, head back to pages 785–787.

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

You've just been sent to endnote 324 from p. 787 — off Johnette's "Much later, in subsequent events' light," as Hal walks away from Ennet House's door. The note (pp. 1066–72) is a full scene with its own dateline, 17 NOVEMBER — the afternoon of that same day: the E.T.A. males' locker room around 1420h, where Pemulis, down early for a challenge match against Freer, finds his fourteen-year-old Big Buddy Todd Possalthwaite hunched and weeping because his developer father has welched on a Disney World promise. The note opens in a generic "you" and lets its tenses slip — deliberate — and it trails six lettered sub-footnotes (a–f).

Terms, in order of appearance

entrepôt (p. 1067) — French: a depot, a warehouse; Pemulis-speak for a stash-spot.
Tenuate (p. 1068) — real prescription diet pill, a stimulant; sub-footnote d covers its slow 36-hour clearance.
Seldane (p. 1069) — real antihistamine; endnote 22's "mucoidal desiccator" — dry eyes, dry mouth, no buzz.
Joan Sutherland (p. 1069) — real operatic soprano; the WETA station theme.
first-order predicate logic (p. 1071) — real: the formal logic of quantified statements; part of the sermon's arsenal.
fuller's earth (sub-footnote a) — real absorbent clay powder; the note adds the aluminum-impotence panic that made it fashionable.
brachiation (sub-footnote f) — real word: swinging by the arms; the 16s' Euroclay in-joke.

After you read: three things

1. The book's great ironist, caught being earnest. Possalthwaite's crisis is total — "Nothing's true" — and Freer's mirror-side cynicism offers him nothing. Pemulis's consolation is ridiculous, sincere, and correct all at once: "Todder, you can trust math... Whose truth is deductive truth. Independent of sense or emotionality... listen: it's true" (p. 1071), backed by a litany of mathematicians and one calculus axiom. His parting line earns its place: "Never trust the father you can see."

2. Don't skim the parenthetical on p. 1068. Buried mid-scene, in brackets, is the answer to a question the book left open: how Pemulis and Hal really escaped on-the-spot urinalysis after the Eschaton debacle — an implied threat to tell Hal about what you watched Pemulis walk in on at pp. 550–53. The note delivers a load-bearing plot fact at full speed and moves on; catching it is your job.

3. Track the two medicine-cabinet details, then read the last line. Pemulis took pre-match Tenuate, and feels only "enforced-feeling dryness in his eyes and mouth" — no verve (p. 1068). After lunch he'd found Wayne, rheumy with a cold, rooting through sick Troeltsch's bedside table for Seldane (p. 1069). The note ends with Stice bursting in: "Troeltsch's got Wayne on the air and Wayne's lost his mind." What got into whom is implied, never adjudicated; the assembling is left to you.

Written only from this endnote and pages before its callout on p. 787. Safe to read before you start.