the montage's concealment catalogue
Poor Tony Krause hunched forward in a stall in his ghastly suspenders and purloined cap, his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands
Context
One instant, seven locations, and nearly everyone caught mid-concealment. What the panels catch, again and again, is small hiding: Gately asleep in his "Lone-Rangerish sleeping mask," Poor Tony in a "purloined cap" hiding in a library men's room, Pemulis and Struck who "blarneyed their way past the library-attendant" into a restricted stack, Avril whose "whereabouts on the grounds were throughout this interval unknown." Stop the book's world at any one moment, the catalogue implies, and concealment is what most of the cast turns out to be privately doing — masked, capped, blarneying, or unaccounted-for; hiding as the population's resting state. (The simultaneity device itself — the montage form — is time-perception's per the pickup mandate; taken here is only its concealment content.)