the boys' Concavity cosmology: Methuen, "The City That Interdependence Rebuilt" — the new border boosterized — "An infestation of feral hamsters in…"

The border town's civic spin caught in one slogan: Methuen, "the new-border burg," bills itself as "The City That Interdependence Rebuilt" — the coercive euphemism (086's "Interdependence is as Interdependence does") repurposed as Chamber-of-Commerce boosterism, the town nearest the Concavity selling its frontier status as renewal. And the political geography is felt as a live hazard: the "waste-rich terrain of metro Boston" is exactly what makes a hamster infestation plausible, the Reconfiguration's dumping ground reaching down to the city itself. The same word that named a mugging in Gentle's cabinet names a town's pride at the wall.