Marathe and Steeply: the Entertainment (p. 88)
Marathe sat alone and blanket-lapped in his customized fauteuil de rollent on a kind of outcropping or shelf about halfway up, waiting, amusing himself with his shadow. […] so that the spokes of his chair’s rear wheels cast over two whole counties below gigantic asterisk-shadows, whose fine black radial lines he could cause to move by playing slightly with the wheels’ rubber rims; and his head’s shadow brought to much of the suburb West Tucson a premature dusk.
Context
The un-rostered opening of the whole Marathe/Steeply mountainside serial: the wheelchair enters the book already mythologized, its wheel-spokes thrown across two counties by the Brockengespenst trick — the disabled body distended to landscape scale, an early visual thesis for how large the A.F.R. will loom. ("[F]auteuil de rollent" is DFW's deliberately broken French; n.37 glosses the term with the single word "Wheelchair." — see Texture.)