IJ study archive

Scene 029: marathe steeply entertainment

Scene
29
Pages
87–93
When
30 April YDAU (2009), sunset into dusk (opens the mountainside serial — every installment is the night of 30 Apr–1 May YDAU)
Where
shale outcropping on a mountainside above Tucson AZ (Tortolita foothills); A.F.R.'s Southwest Ops-areain: Mountainside outcrop above Tucson
POV
3rd person over Marathe — syntax Frenchified throughout ('the city Tucson')

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Open questions this scene bears on

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 10)

Summary

First installment of the book's spine-conversation: Rémy Marathe of Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents sits blanket-lapped in his wheelchair on an outcropping above Tucson at sunset, amusing himself by casting county-sized Bröckengespenst shadows, a machine pistol under the blanket, while U.S.O.U.S. operative Hugh Steeply — enormous, electrolysis-rashed, in wig, dress, and wildly misaligned prosthetic breasts — slides down the slope cursing. Their agenda: the attaché incident. A cartridge of "the Entertainment" arrived by physical mail, postal-routed through the Southwest where the A.F.R.'s dissemination mechanism is proposed; twenty-three people are gone. Steeply probes for A.F.R. involvement and floats the victim's Canadian citizenship and a prior connection — the auteur's widow, a Québecer from L'Islet county who "was fucking just about everything with a pulse," particularly Canadian ones. Beneath the sparring runs the betrayal-architecture: Marathe has truly betrayed the A.F.R. for his wife's medical care while pretending to Fortier that he only pretends.

What to notice

The rules of the book's spine-conversation are all set in this first installment, so notice the stagecraft. Geopolitics is mounted on ridiculous bodies — Steeply sliding down the slope cursing in wig and wildly misaligned prosthetic breasts, Marathe with a machine pistol under the lap-blanket — which keeps the novel's most abstract debating pinned to flesh and costume. The narration itself wears a costume: over Marathe the syntax goes Frenchified ("the city Tucson"), point of view rendered as accent. The two men sit facing the same direction, "as of old friends at the cartridge-viewer together" — spectation folded into the very posture of a scene about lethal spectation. The Bröckengespenst shadow-play teaches the book's ghost-optics early: Gespenst means specter or wraith, and the first wraith in the novel is a living man's magnified shadow bringing premature dusk to a suburb — light, projection, and monstrous scale, the Entertainment's own physics. Under it all runs the betrayal architecture: Marathe pretending to Fortier that he only pretends to double, a quadruple bluff the dialogue never states plainly — the scene trusts you to track who believes what about the pretending. And keep one clock note: this entire thread, four hundred pages of it, is a single night's conversation, dusk to dawn, sliced and dealt across the whole novel.

Beats — page-by-page
  • pp. 87-88: Marathe alone above area code 6026; the explosion-like Sonoran sunset vs. the "watery and somehow sad" Papineau ones where his wife needs care; the fauteuil de rollent (n.37: 'Wheelchair').
  • p. 88: The Bröckengespenst shadow-play — wheel-spokes casting asterisks over two counties, his head's shadow bringing premature dusk to West Tucson (n.38: Goethe's Faust, Walpurgisnacht; "Gespenst means specter or wraith").
  • pp. 88-89: Steeply's pratfall entrance (cactus yelp, runs, thorn stubs); Marathe releases the machine pistol to catch his arm; "Stealth becomes you." / "Go shit in your chapeau."
  • p. 89: Language politics: Fortier (n.39: A.F.R. leader, boyhood friend of Marathe's late older brothers, "both struck and killed by trains"; A.F.R. = "Québec's most dreaded and rapacious anti-O.N.A.N. terrorist cell") wanted French; but Marathe, having committed "to in truth do this — betray," serves at Steeply's pleasure and speaks U.S.A. English (n.40: the full quadruple-bluff schema — Fortier believes Marathe only pretends to double; Marathe and few B.S.S. men know he pretends to pretend; death would be the smallest of his problems).
  • pp. 89-90: The "razzle-dazzle": a cartridge of the Entertainment by ordinary mail, not on InterLace pulse, postal codes routed through the desert Southwest; the Saudi Ministry of Entertainment's "shrill stink."
  • p. 90: Casualty count: "Upwards of twenty... mostly police before word got to a level they could stop police from going in before they killed the power."
  • pp. 90-91: The attaché's profile: diplomatic status, but Canadian-born (Ottawa, Arab émigrés, Montreal residence); Marathe: "We have... larger seafood to cook."
  • p. 91: The lion-hide desert; their facing-the-same-direction intimacy "as of old friends at the cartridge-viewer together"; Steeply's bombshell — the victim's "prior possible involvement with the widow of the auteur we both know was responsible for the Entertainment... The samizdat"; the widow taught at Brandeis where the attaché did his residency; "There's such a thing as political sex"; she's from L'Islet county, three years on the watch list.
  • pp. 91-92: Marathe denies lists and civilian warnings; mocks the cock-eyed tits; Steeply: theories, countertheories, antitheories — "twenty-three human beings lost for all time: that'd be some hoax, no?"
  • p. 92: The Tine parenthesis: Rodney Tine Sr., architect of O.N.A.N. and Reconfiguration, whose stenographer doubled as DuPlessis's — Mlle. Luria Perec of Lamartine, L'Islet — raising the double/triple question of Tine's loyalty (n.41: 'doubling'/'tripling' defined).
  • pp. 92-93: Closing staging: Steeply, shy of fixing his décolletage, dons rhinestone-embellished sunglasses ("Rod the God," p. 93); true dusk begins erasing the wig's chaotic shadow; lights twinkle in the Rincon foothills; he cups his body around the match. (The scene's last lines fall on p. 93 per the markers; scene 031 picks up there.)

Themes in this scene

  • Surveillance and Disguise: Steeply's grotesque femininity (which Marathe suspects he half-craves), field-protocol paranoia, and the n.40 hall of mirrors — espionage as nested pretending, this scene's other "pretending to pretend" beside Kate Gompert's insincere-seeming sincerity.
  • Nationalism and O.N.A.N.: the full apparatus surfaces — A.F.R. vs. B.S.S./U.S.O.U.S., Reconfiguration, Gentle's White House, the samizdat as anti-O.N.A.N. weapon; even the wind gets nationalized ("of about the temperature of a U.S.A. clothes-dryer set on Low").
  • Entertainment and the Self: the Entertainment graduates from domestic horror (scenes 007-028) to strategic weapon; the question "weapon or warning or hoax?" is opened here and never fully closed.
  • Ghosts and Wraiths: the Bröckengespenst (n.38's explicit gloss: wraith) — two agents casting monstrous specters over an American city; the book's wraith-vocabulary introduced as optics avant la lettre.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • Steeply's "fucking just about everything with a pulse... Particularly a Canadian pulse" (p. 91) partially corroborates, at espionage level, the paranoid rant the JOI-figure delivers about Avril's "cavortings with not one not two but over thirty Near Eastern medical attachés" in the professional-conversationalist scene (p. 30, scene 005) — the rant was not pure delusion (Carlisle catch).

Forward

  • The unnamed "widow of the auteur" is Avril: confirms her L'Islet origin (JOI buried in L'Islet, p. 65, scene 020), her watch-list past (scene 020, p. 64), and seeds the Avril-infidelity dossier (Wayne, the Moment researcher, n.269's Bain correspondence); "particularly a Canadian pulse" lands hardest on John Wayne later.
  • Luria Perec/Tine/DuPlessis triangle: the stenographer revelation makes Gately's accidental killing (scene 016) a strategic decapitation — and Luria reappears as the A.F.R.'s operative-seductress late in the book.
  • Marathe's brothers "struck and killed by trains" (n.39, whose sub-note already says "See Note 304 sub") point to le jeu du prochain train, the A.F.R.'s train-jumping initiation — full treatment at scene n304.
  • This scene OPENS the mountainside serial; installments in order: 029 → 031 → 033 → 035 → 038 (pp. 126-127) → 072 (freedom-from/-to, pp. 317-321) → 077 (Steeply's Helen-cover assignment, p. 375) → 088 (the pea-soup parable, pp. 418-430) → 096 (p-terminals, pp. 470-475) → 098 (Master copies, pp. 489-491) → 101 (B.S.S. test casualties, pp. 507-508) → 103 (Odalisque myths, dawn 1 May, pp. 528-530). Marathe's thread then re-enters at Ennet House as "Henri" the Swiss (scenes 149/151/153/156, 14 Nov). The Moment journalist covering Orin (scene 012) is this same Steeply in his other disguise.
  • "Killed the power" as the only countermeasure: repeated when authorities war-game M.I.T. language-riot-style containment of the samizdat later; the only defense against the Entertainment is unplugging — the book's media thesis in operational form.

Notable passages (5)
  • p. 88: the Bröckengespenst paragraph ("his head's shadow brought to much of the suburb West Tucson a premature dusk") — scale-play and wraith-introduction at once.
  • p. 89: "Stealth becomes you." — the duo's register established in three words.
  • p. 90: "The local constabulary were shall we say unprepared for an Entertainment like this." — euphemism under pressure.
  • p. 91: "as of old friends at the cartridge-viewer together, or a long-married couple" — the narrator framing geopolitics as co-spectation; entertainment-self folded into the scene's own staging.
  • p. 92: "twenty-three human beings lost for all time: that'd be some hoax, no?" — the moral arithmetic that powers every later desert exchange.

What links here Manuscript differences (1) · Timeline events here (28) · Echoes (2) · Connected from (26) · Passages quoted here (37) · Motifs (4)

Manuscript differences

Timeline events here

Echoes

Connected from

Passages quoted here

Motifs