the montage; Avril and the blue pen
Ms. Avril Incandenza, seeming somehow to have three or four cigarettes all going at once, secures from Information the phone and e-mail #s of a journalistic business address on East Tucson AZ’s Blasted Expanse Blvd., then begins to dial, using the stern of a blue felt pen to stab at the console’s keys.
Context
One frame of the montage catches the operations-machine in anxious overdrive. Avril, "seeming somehow to have three or four cigarettes all going at once," is tracking down the contact numbers for a Tucson journalistic address — Steeply's Moment magazine, the profiler circling the family — and dialing by stabbing the keys "with the stern of a blue felt pen." The queen does not wait to be investigated; she reaches out to manage the investigator, her characteristic control running so hot it needs a pen as a proxy for the fingers. The whole surveillance-love apparatus, turned outward, caught mid-stab.