Marathe & Steeply / betrayal

One sentence carries the entire disguise apparatus, itemized like a kit-list: the prosthetic breasts (the body falsified), the woman-journalist credentials (the profession invented), and — folded in as if incidental — the recent divorce, the true biographical wound that gives the "Helen" legend its human ballast and keeps the officer's cover breathing. This is the prosthetic-breast material the disability-deformity anthology explicitly routed here: dd kept only the prosthesis-diction (Steeply's womanhood as a worn prosthesis, pairing his strapped-on anatomy with Marathe's stumps); the disguise apparatus itself is ours, and here it stands complete — a man built out of falsified parts and a fabricated mission to "cultivate" the Incandenza circle. Marathe mocks "the inoriginality of a journalistic cover" and then the cover's false name, doubting "the meaty electrolysized face of Steeply would be responsible of launching even one ship or vessel" — the Helen-of-Troy joke that names the disguise even as it derides it.