Scene 038: marathe steeply disguises

• p. 126: Steeply: Boston as Ops center "signifies: the place of the supposed Entertainment's origin"; Marathe's cover-logic — closest U.S. city to the Convexity, "Within as you say the distance of spit"; the squeaking wheelchair, the cold rising on the desert floor.
• p. 126: The anti-Entertainment raised (the director's rumored counter-film as antidote) and dismissed by U.S.O.U.S. as possibly an F.L.Q. bargaining chip; n.47: the F.L.Q. — younger, rowdier than the A.F.R., ironically adopting Hawaiian motifs because Québec is now itself a U.S. annex-territory.
• p. 126: Marathe's interior turn: the dance-hall globe of Tucson's lights recalling Val d'Or; "Marathe's wife was dying slowly of ventricular restenosis. He thought: die twice." (n.48: restenosis — progressive narrowing of cardiac sinuses, rare before Interdependence, now Québec's third-leading adult cause of death, associated with chronic dioxin exposure — i.e., a Concavity/Convexity disease.)
• p. 126: "Why do they never send you into the field as yourself, Steeply?" — the Haitian year; tradecraft observed and observed-back: Steeply's interviewer's preening-delay device, the not-yet-feminine thumb-flick, the feminine fingernail-examination protocol Marathe has known since youth.
• p. 127: Coyotes like high-strung dogs; air in puffs "as if from the turning of a volume's pages"; Marathe files every word and gesture for report to M. Fortier — he is a triple-or-quadruple agent mid-betrayal; the A.F.R. wrongly believes him eidetic ("could remember several incidents of crucial observations he had failed to later recall" — he forgot, then remembered that he forgot).
• p. 127: Second dated header; the one-sentence coda: Marathe calls the U.S.A. "Your walled nation" / "Your murated nation."

Backward

• Serial continuity: continues scenes 029/031/033/035; all installments are the same night.
• The free-floating one-sentence second section ("Your walled nation") reads, per Carlisle, as formally enacting the eidetic-memory passage just above it — an observation Marathe forgot to file, then recalled (his structural reading, recorded); "murated" also wires to the ATHSCME-fan protective walls of the Concavity (p. 93, scene 030).

Forward

• "U.S.A. persons' shrugs are always as if trying to lift a heavy thing" (p. 126) lands two pages early on Lyle's weight commandment (p. 128, scene 039) — the desert serial and the weight room joined by the heavy-thing figure (Carlisle makes the stitch explicit; the wheelchair squeak seeded here becomes the A.F.R.'s audible signature in the endgame).
• Mme. Marathe's restenosis is Marathe's entire motive structure — his betrayal of the A.F.R. buys her U.S. medical care (elaborated pp. 778-782: born without a skull, Gertraude); "die twice" compresses the love-vs-cause choice his temple doctrine (scene 035) pretends is simple.
• The restenosis echo: the Jarvik IX woman of Steeply's own cover article (scene 045, p. 142) has "irreversible restenosis of the heart" — same Interdependence disease, surfacing in the planted Moment piece; a deliberate-looking authorial stitch between Steeply's two fictions.
• The anti-Entertainment rumor returns via Molly Notkin's interrogation (pp. 788-795, scene 159) and the deathbed-of-JOI question of a master "anti" version; it underwrites both U.S.O.U.S.'s and the A.F.R.'s hunt converging on E.T.A. and Joelle/Gately in the book's last movement.
• n.47's F.L.Q.-Hawaiiana resurfaces in the separatist tally (scene 046) and in the novel's running joke of separatist factions distinguished by costume (cf. n.304's history of the A.F.R. and le jeu du prochain train).
• "Murated nation" anticipates Gentle's experialism logic (scene 081, pp. 380-386: Mario's film of the Interdependence pageant): walls, fans, and catapults as national self-definition.

• p. 126: "Marathe's wife was dying slowly of ventricular restenosis. He thought: die twice." — the serial's emotional core in two sentences.
• p. 126: "U.S.A. persons' shrugs are always as if trying to lift a heavy thing." — national gesture-typology; pre-echo of Lyle's commandment (scene 039).
• p. 126: "this really could be some sort of game for you and the F.L.Q., to hold out the promise of the anti-Entertainment as a chip" — antidote-as-leverage; the book's cure is never not also a move.
• p. 127: "puffs of sudden air as if from the turning of a volume's pages" — the night itself as a read book; serial's signature scenery register.
• p. 127: "Your walled nation" or "Your murated nation." — the epithet in both its forms.