Clipperton's suicide — "Clipperton pulls out of various pockets…"
Clipperton pulls out of various pockets in his wet complicated coat an elaborately altered copy of NAJT’s biweekly ranking report, a sepia’d snapshot of some whey-faced Midwestern couple’s wedding, and the hideous blunt-barreled Glock 17 9 mm. semiautomatic, which even as both Incandenzas reach for the sky Clipperton places to his right—not left—temple, as in with his good right stick-hand, closes his eyes and scrunches up his face and blows his legitimated brains out for real and all time, eradicates his map and then some
Context
High noon in an unused top-floor Subdorm C room, two days after the trilingual NAJT prints him #1: with James Incandenza counseling and Mario's head-clamped Bolex recording, Clipperton lays out the altered ranking sheet, the wedding snapshot, and the Glock, and "eradicates his map and then some." The kill-line fuses the whole theme — "legitimated" carries the causality (the ranking-map made the wins real, and the reality was uninhabitable), and the idiom coined for Gentle's blackmail at p. 407 closes over an actual seventeen-year-old skull. The book's most literal self-elimination of a map.