Scene 057: dmz show and tell

• p. 211-212: The hat of tablets; Pemulis's side-to-side film-noir head-thing; epithets ("Yale U. of the Ivy League of Acid"); CIA-era experiments — "Subjects locked away in institutions and written off as casualties of peace."
• p. 212-213: The bell-bottomed mod-hipster trademark; sale fantasias (think tanks, "very progressive and hip-type nursing homes," Harvard Square chess-players) vs. the "sheer-entertainment route" of dosing the Gatorade barrels (at "the meet with Port Washington Tuesday" — see the date-tension note above); "a baker's dozen" of tablets; contraband arrayed jeweler-like in the window-flaw's ale-colored light-bubble, on the wall the poster of the paranoid king and "an enormous hand-drawn Sierpinski gasket" (n.73: Nwangi's beady room-inspections); "The literature's mute on the titration."
• p. 213-214: MED.COM searches yield "potent this, sinister that"; Hal — "his mother Avril's child when it comes to databases" — demands a physical med-library trip.
• p. 214-215: The Moment-sourced Leavenworth soldier: mind literally misplaced, found "in some impossible lotus position"; Axford's joke that Pemulis has stumbled on "a possible explanation for poor old Lyle and his lotus position down in the weight room" (p. 214); the Army's defense that he no longer "legally exist[s] enough to bring suit"; "We could even designate it 'Ethel,' for on the phone" (p. 215); Hal proposes two or three tablets "knowing he sounds greedy but unable to help himself," and arranges the tablets into E.T.A.'s cardioid shape.
• p. 215-216: The Antitoi flashback: small-arms-draped duo, mirrors and pebbled vases multiplying the head-waggling into "a kind of group psychomotor seizure," 5x-speed porn cartridge; 650 mg for trinket prices — Pemulis as W. Penn buying New Jersey; the sneaker-toe drop-ceiling entrepôt.
• p. 216-217: The duty-to-sample decision; Hal's organic/nonaddictive condition; fence-side 11/5 — Schacht's sanguine exhibition loss to the Syrian, his post-knee "purgatorial existence in 128-256 Alphabetville"; E.W.D. catapult thud, the keening unseen projectile, the yellow sheep-shaped cloud, ATHSCME fans on the Lowell-Methuen border; 36 demand-free hours required (HmH "just not being a good DMZ-dropping venue at all").
• p. 217-218: Calendar engineering: Port Washington tomorrow (chartered buses, no motel); the 11/20 fundraiser vs. Québec's "notoriously hapless" Jr. Davis/Wightman squads via Avril's quiet offices (n.74; n.75: Hal's private dread of being fed to Wayne for the gala); the Vaught twins — fused at the temples, unbeaten in three years, banned from singles; window set at 11/20-21 before the WhataBurger and 12/12 Boards.
• p. 218: Hangover forecasting: Axford's "wrung-out sponge" vs. Hal's "pale sweet aura, a luminescence" (n.76: the B.C.D.C. Gifted classification, dictionary-memorizing for "a proudly nonchalant mother," the LSD-afterglow-like halo of approved grace) — "Halation, Axford observed."
• p. 218-219: Pemulis's unexamined assumption he'll make the Tucson list at rank 128; deLint's e-mail-penpal/one-enormous-tit simile (n.77: Pemulis's Bosch-hell deLint TP game); Hal a lock "barring some sort of cataclysmic ankle-relapse."
• p. 219: Schacht and the Syrian laughing at the net; Mario's laugh rings out — warmth closing a scene of careful bad planning.

Backward

• The Sierpinski gasket on Pemulis's wall (p. 213) is the figure Wallace himself cited for the novel's structure (and Carlisle's Introduction thesis-figure) — the book's blueprint hanging in the DMZ-dealer's room.
• "Madame Psychosis" as DMZ's name (scene 050) now sits beside the soldier's lost mind and scene 056's prayer to lose one's mind (p. 202) — three statements of the same dread.
• "Halation" was Hal's nickname-gloss in the locker room (scene 032, p. 97 range: "A halo-shaped exposure-pattern around light sources seen on chemical film at low speed"); n.76 deepens it into the approval-performance halo — the precise emotional mechanism scene 001 shows burned out.

Forward

• Continues scene 050 (same 4 Nov, the hat's contents now on the bed) and scene 013's DMZ foreshadow; the 11/20-21 plan is the fuse of the book's endgame — see the n.321 narrative-note file (scene n321: the med-library findings, the fitviavi/G.C.-M.S.-invisibility data, Pemulis's titration math — print's wrong derivative per the Mike Strong edition note the archive records) and the 20-Nov arc itself (scene 183's dateline; Pemulis's discovered stash and expulsion 17 Nov, n.324/n.332 files; the open question of whether/what Hal ingests before Year of Glad, scene 001).
• Antitoi Entertainment returns catastrophically: the A.F.R. raid on the shop, Lucien's death by broom, and the brothers' inventory (including DMZ and read-only Entertainment copies) — scene 097, pp. 475-489 — the dumbshow comedy here is that thread's overture.
• DMZ-count tension (recorded in the archive's catalog, Carlisle C07): here "a baker's dozen" (p. 213) / "thirteen incredibly potent 50-mg. artifacts" totaling 650 mg (pp. 215-216) vs. p. 482, scene 097's "eighteen" lozenges of 650 mg each — authorial; Carlisle reads the barter as 650 mg TOTAL. Kept as printed per scene.
• The Ethel-Merman anecdote comes "out of fucking Moment of all sources" (p. 214) — Moment is Hugh Steeply's cover employer (scenes 045/061/064): the Entertainment-hunting agency's house organ supplying the boys' drug lore, a wink the boys can't see.
• n.75's "utter demapping" extends the maps-territory idiom (scenes 040/054); the Vaught twins and the fundraiser stage-set return in the gala scenes; Port Washington meet results thread into the following week's E.T.A. material.
• The E.W.D. catapult and yellow cloud are the annular waste-cycle (scene 047's Concavity context; Mario's film history) intruding on a casual afternoon.

• p. 214: "One monograph had this toss-off about DMZ where the guy invites you to envision acid that has itself dropped acid." — the compound's whole mythology in one sentence.
• p. 214: "the massive dose picked his mind up and carried it off somewhere and put it down someplace and forgot where" — the DMZ thesis-anecdote; pairs with scene 056's mind-in-a-newspaper prayer.
• p. 215: "We could even designate it 'Ethel,' for on the phone" — code-naming as the boys' native tongue (cf. "Please commit a crime").
• p. 216: "feeling the way W. Penn in his Quaker Oats hat... must have felt trading a few trinkets" — Pemulis's self-congratulation, with the colonial irony fully loaded against him given who the Antitois turn out to be.
• pp. 216-217: "his tiny older brother, who resembles him the way creatures of the same Order but not the same Family might resemble one another" — Hal's posture "subtly but warmly inclined" toward head-rigged Mario; fathers-sons/disability warmth amid the scheming.
• p. 218: "a kind of pale sweet aura, a luminescence.... Halation, Axford observed." — with n.76, the single best key to Hal's psychology this side of scene 001.