Knives & spikes

Blades and spikes recur throughout, aimed with unnerving frequency at the eye, and the spike-in-the-eye becomes the A.F.R.'s signature. The motif's unexplained crux is the word "KNIFE finger-written on the steamed mirror of a nonpublic bathroom" (p. 16), which pays off much later as a "steamed lavatory mirror with a knife sticking out of the pane" (p. 951). Around it cluster a plane "incising" the sky, a "writhing animal with a knife in its eye," a "spike into the right eye," Bertraund's rusty "railroad spike in his eye" (pp. 485-486), and Yolanda's spike-heel driven through an eye — the tactic tied directly to "the A.F.R., whose signature is the spike-in-the-eye." Blade imagery thus concentrates on vision itself: the organ of watching, in a book obsessed with lethal watching, is the recurring target.