everything known only at second, third, fourth hand

Notkin's whole deposition is an architecture of hearsay: pinned under a lamp, she relays what Madame Psychosis told her about a lethal cartridge that Madame Psychosis herself "had never seen," about an Auteur's motives no one witnessed, about deaths no one present can confirm — knowledge only ever "believed" and always at one more remove than the thing itself. The scene is the theme's epistemology made literal, an interrogation that extracts a long chain of secondhand report and arrives nowhere firsthand, the object at the center (the Entertainment, the truth of the suicides) never directly known by anyone speaking. (The Joelle-deformity content stays her spine's / entertainment-self's.) [sweep · shared-ground entertainment-self]