Pemulis acquires the DMZ
DMZ is sometimes also referred to in some metro Boston chemical circles as Madame Psychosis, after a popular very-early-morning cult radio personality on M.I.T.’s student-run radio station WYYY-109, ‘Largest Whole Prime on the FM Band,’ which Mario Incandenza and E.T.A. stats-wienie and Eschaton game-master Otis P. Lord listen to almost religiously.
Context
The screen's catch (plan: "MP radio, squarely in scope"): Madame Psychosis arrives in this scene as a street name — the incredibly potent DMZ christened after the radio show, in a paragraph nominally about drug nomenclature. One sentence establishes the whole radio apparatus in miniature: the cult very-early-morning slot, the station and its number-theory call-sign joke, and the show's named in-house audience — Mario Incandenza and Otis P. Lord listening "almost religiously." The drug/show doubling planted here is what the anthology's later Madame-Psychosis ambiguities trade on (the screen elsewhere had to reject n.321's "I'd drop Madame Psychosis" as the drug, not the show). The rest of the scene is transaction logistics; its one other film-flavored beat (Hal waiting with the Riverside Hamlet for Mario's "conceptual film-type project") is uncatalogued and noted in Flags, not entered.