The pond-draining and the WYYY-engineer snatch
The eighth-floor window’s purview goes all the way to the ridge of the hillside at the Gardens’ other end. Two Frisbees and what looks like a disembowelled ring of Frisbee float back and forth along this ridge, dreamily floating back and forth, sometimes dipping below the ridge and lost, for a moment, to the specular vision of Tine.
Context
A Carlisle-catalogued item: Tine possibly watching the A.F.R. snatch from his window. What the raw actually gives: Tine at the eighth-floor State House Annex window all morning, "standing with his hands at the small of his back at a window on the eighth floor of the State House Annex on Beacon and Joy Sts., looking southwest and down at the concentric rings of pond and crowd and trucks" (pp. 622-623), and the narration pausing to establish — in optics vocabulary, "the specular vision of Tine" — that his sightline reaches exactly to the ridge and no farther (things dip below it and are "lost"). The second A.F.R. van then appears on that ridge (pp. 625-626), i.e. at the outer edge of what Tine can see, while the engineer and the curbside van sit below it, out of view. So the text engineers a precise geometry of partial spectation and leaves it there: whether the Unspecified Services chief watched the wheelchair go over the ridge is never said. Carlisle's catalogue row records the possibility; the raw supports the sightline, not the watching.