IJ study archive

Scene 031: marathe steeply duplessis

Scene
31
Pages
93–95
When
30 April YDAU (2009), dusk deepening — continuous with scene 029 (mountainside serial, night of 30 Apr–1 May)
Where
outcropping above Tucson AZin: Mountainside outcrop above Tucson
POV
3rd person over Marathe

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 7)

Summary

The desert dialogue resumes on the mechanics of trust. Steeply verifies the obvious — Marathe will report this interface to Fortier ("'n sûr") — and then verifies that Marathe will report the verification, exposing the regress: "Or would it be quadrupling." Marathe, hand on the hot grip of his blanket-hidden Sterling UL35, voices the unfinishable sentence: "...have I merely pretended to pretend to pretend to betray." They circle DuPlessis: Steeply notes DuPlessis suspected Tine of holding back what he passed sexually to Luria; Marathe observes that DuPlessis has now "abruptly... passed away from life. Under circumstances of almost ridiculous suspicion. An inept burglary and grippe indeed" — with a laugh that has "this misfortune to sound false and overhearty, whether or not sincere." On Tine's loyalties Marathe is simple: if the betrayal were incomplete, Québec would know — "Luria would be aware." A tossed cigarette blooms orange below; something tight between them loosens.

What to notice

Watch the scene's subject — pretending — leak out of the dialogue and into the stage business: while the two anatomize triple- and quadruple-agency, Marathe makes a mustache of his finger, "pretending for some reason to stifle a need to sneeze", later "pretended to fuss with his blanket, rearranging it", and Steeply "did a brief pretend-Charleston"; even the narrator catches the disease, able to report only that Steeply "now looked at him, in probability, behind the dark glasses." The prose is in costume too: told over Marathe, its English runs on his Québécois syntax from the first line — "The heavy-tongued English of Steeply was even more difficult to understand with a cigarette in the mouth" — the narration wearing an accent the way Steeply wears the wig. And the desert light delivers the closing figure: the men's shadows "becoming squat and retreating back up toward the two men", every projection returning to its source just as the regress of pretendings folds back onto the pretender.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 93: Steeply, cigarette in mouth — "And you'll of course report this little interface of you and me right back to Fortier"; Marathe: "'n sûr."
  • pp. 93-94: Steeply anatomized: ex-contact-sport bulk gone fat, electrolysis pimples, the wrong elbow-out match-lighting of a non-woman, never fully turning his back; Marathe's wheel-clamps locked, grip on the pebbled pistol-grip; Marathe's surmise that "something in Steeply enjoyed his grotesque appearance and craved the humiliation of the field-disguises his B.S.S. superiors requested of him."
  • p. 94: The regress made explicit — "We know Fortier and the A.F.R. know you're here with me now." / "But do my brothers on wheels know that you are knowing this...?"; the UL35 with no safety; "...have I merely pretended to pretend to pretend to betray" (n.42: the unraveling — Marathe's superiors believe he only pretends to betray for his wife's U.S. cardiac-prosthetic care; in fact he really betrays, probably actually for that care: "only pretending only to pretend").
  • p. 94: DuPlessis: Tine "tried to hold back on the information he passed sexually to Luria"; Marathe's false-overhearty laugh; "An inept burglary and grippe indeed."
  • pp. 94-95: Tine's loyalty test reduced to one axiom — "Luria would be aware"; the cigarette stub's orange bloom on the dark mountainside; contemplative silence; "Something tight in the air between them loosened"; dusk settles, Steeply examines his mesquite scratch.

Themes in this scene

  • Surveillance and Disguise: this scene's purest statement of espionage as infinite regress — pretending stacked until sincerity becomes undecidable even to the pretender (the laugh "false and overhearty, whether or not sincere" — even the narrator can't adjudicate).
  • Nationalism and O.N.A.N.: DuPlessis's death recoded as geopolitics; the Tine/Luria channel makes the U.S.-Canada conflict run on adulterated intimacy rather than armies.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • The "inept burglary and grippe" cover story Marathe scoffs at happens to be the literal truth (scene 016) — the reader knows what neither agent can: the most suspicious-looking event in the geopolitical plot was a genuine accident. Espionage's epistemic disease in one dramatic irony.
  • The pretend-regress is the espionage mirror of Kate Gompert's clinically undecidable sincerity (scene 024, p. 78) and of Rader's "pretended to pretend" sneeze (scene 018, p. 60) — three registers of the same epistemic disease within a few pages of each other.

Forward

  • "An inept burglary and grippe indeed": direct receipt of scene 016 — at the highest levels, nobody believes Don Gately was just a burglar; the men who do eventually shoot Gately are Nucks enraged by Lenz, not DuPlessis avengers (pp. 608+ — "the trio Lenz has managed to somehow enrage is Nucks"), but this high-level skepticism is why the A.D.A.'s warrant is the least of his problems: the A.F.R. side of the ledger stays open (n.363: they eventually get Kite).
  • n.42's "wife" detail (cardiac-prosthetic technology) sharpens scene 029's vaguer "medical care"; the full horror of Mme. Marathe's condition (born without a skull, among the Concavity's teratogenic births) arrives with the Gertraude story (scene 156, pp. 774-782; also scene 103, pp. 528-530) — disability-deformity thread pending there.
  • "Luria would be aware": Luria Perec's operational omniscience previews her role running the A.F.R.'s honey-trap operations (Orin's capture; the Antitoi murders' aftermath).
  • The loosening at scene's end licenses the philosophical turn of scene 035: interrogation relaxing into the temple debate.

Notable passages (3)
  • p. 94: "...have I merely pretended to pretend to pretend to betray." — the sentence n.42 exists to fail to untangle; surveillance-disguise anthology core.
  • p. 94: "An inept burglary and grippe indeed." — the plot's two threads (Gately, A.F.R.) soldered in a single dry line.
  • pp. 94-95: the cigarette-stub paragraph ("a tiny bloom of orange... Something tight in the air between them loosened") — tradecraft dissolving into intimacy; the duo's double-portrait register.

What links here Manuscript differences (1) · Timeline events here (14) · Connected from (10) · Passages quoted here (21)

Manuscript differences

Timeline events here

Connected from

Passages quoted here