The Concavity cabinet; Clipperton — "TINE places two large maps (also…"
TINE places two large maps (also courtesy of Ms. Heath’s crafts class) on Govt.-issue easels. They look both to be of the good old U.S.A. The first map is your more or less traditional standard issue, with the U.S. looking really big in white and Mexico’s northern fringes a tasteful ladies’-room pink and Canada’s brooding bottom hem a garish, almost menacing red. The second North American map looks neither old nor all that good, traditionally speaking. It has a concavity. It looks sort of like some person or persons have taken a deep wicked canine-intensive bite out of its upper right bit, in which an ascending and then descending line has its near-right-angle at what looks to be the historic and now hideously befouled Ticonderoga NY; and the areas north of that jagged line look to be that pushy shade of Canadian red, now. Some little rubber practical-joke-type flies, the blue-bellied kind that live on filth, are stapled in a raisinesque dispersal over the red Concavity.
Context
The literal redrawn map: in Mario's puppet reconstruction of the Concavity Cabinet meeting, Rodney Tine unveils before-and-after maps of North America — crafts-class props with rubber filth-flies stapled on — and the second one simply "has a concavity." The book's territorial catastrophe rendered as a cartographic object you can put on an easel, the "before" of every map-vs-territory argument the novel runs afterward: what gets redrawn here is what Eschaton's kids will fight over the representation of. It comes two lines after Tine's tell-tale slip "Allow me to illustrate what Lur—just what the president means."