The end of the Clipperton legend
Clipperton pulls out of various pockets in his wet complicated coat an elaborately altered copy of NAJT’s biweekly ranking report, a sepia’d snapshot of some whey-faced Midwestern couple’s wedding, and the hideous blunt-barreled Glock 17 9 mm. semiautomatic, which even as both Incandenzas reach for the sky Clipperton places to his right—not left—temple, as in with his good right stick-hand, closes his eyes and scrunches up his face and blows his legitimated brains out for real and all time, eradicates his map and then some; and there’s just an ungodly subsequent mess in there
Context
The kill-line of the Clipperton legend: the Glock-wielding junior who extorted his way to #1 finally gets a sanctioned #1, shows up gunless and wrecked at E.T.A.'s gate two days later, and shoots himself mid-counsel in front of James Incandenza and Bolex-rigged Mario. "Legitimated" carries the whole causality — it's the ranking's becoming real that kills him — and "eradicates his map" is the suicide idiom at its most literal. Carlisle re-applies this exact line to JOI's own suicide less than two years later.