The desert dusk interstitial
The temperature had fallen with the sun. Marathe listened to the cooler evening wind roll across the incline and desert floor. Marathe could sense or feel many million floral pores begin slowly to open, hopeful of dew. The American Steeply produced small exhalations between his teeth as he examined his scratch of the arm. Only one or two remaining tips of the digitate spikes of the radial blades of the sun found crevices between the Tortolitas’ peaks and probed at the roof of the sky. There were the slight and dry locationless rustlings of small living things that wish to come out at night, emerging. The sky was violet.
Context
The whole scene, quoted entire: a one-paragraph splice of 30-April desert dusk cut into the middle of the 3-November locker-room chapter. Nothing happens except nightfall — and that's the point, because the locker room on the other side of the cut is crossing into the same dusk ("The light saddening outside," p. 104), so the book has you holding two calendars, six months and 2,500 miles apart, at a single shared coming-on of night. The purest case of engineered simultaneity: the book teaching you, with pure scenery, to experience two times at once.