the Clipperton Suite: he dies the moment the ranking is legitimated
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
The word doing the work is "legitimated": Clipperton reaches E.T.A.'s front gate and kills himself precisely once his #1 has been made official, sanctioned, real — the goal attained turns out to be uninhabitable. He gets "what he’s surely been burning over and holding himself hostage for all along, a real and sanctioned #1," and it destroys him. This is the #1-without-process warning in its terminal form: a top ranking arrived at by extortion rather than the slog is a place a body cannot survive standing in. (The suicide as clinical event is depression-anhedonia's; landed here is the institutional lesson.)