Scene 086: concavity cabinet clipperton

• pp. 398-399: montage resumes — the Statue of Liberty's 5-ton cast-iron burger kills an engineer; "ANOTHER LOVE CANAL?"; EPA softballers keep "stumbling on" vast drum-fields that New Hampshire insists were planted by short-haired men in white suits in O.N.A.N.-crested trucks; "MY BABY HAS SIX EYES AND BASICALLY NO SKULL"; Gentle declares everything north of the Syracuse-Ticonderoga-Salem line a federal disaster.
• p. 399: the narrator on Mario's method: with Himself's Compugraphic matteing lab "it's hard to tell which of the headlines... have been dickied with"; nobody contests his account of the 16 January meeting since the administration held that recording equipment was "a veritable petri dish of organisms."
• pp. 400-401: the Concavity Cabinet: Gentle reduced to "Hhhaaahh Hhhuuuhh" on pure oxygen; Tine as "oral proxy" (n.156: Mario's strong implication that Tine, not Gentle, is Reconfiguration's dark force — though the note observes this theory founders on Tine's motive and his being "hopelessly smitten with the Québecer Luria P——"); easel photos climax with the multi-eyed infant dragging its shapeless head "like a sack of spuds."
• pp. 401-402: Tine's logic: territory "publicly exposed as this befouled" cannot stay in a Tighter Tidier U.S.A.; the Secretary of State's furious summary confirms the whole thing was engineered — Unspecified Services did the dumping against statute, target states chosen for ballot snubs and a sneeze (the Lincoln-suspending-the-Constitution defense); "The it in the president's Give it away signifies the territory."
• p. 403: the before/after maps (Ms. Heath's crafts class): the second has "a concavity," a canine-intensive bite from Ticonderoga's near-right-angle, rendered in menacing Canadian red with rubber filth-flies stapled on; "Redemisement's probably too technical"; Tine's slip — "Allow me to illustrate what Lur— just what the president means" — Luria P. flickering behind U.S. policy.
• pp. 403-405: relocation comedy: the Secretary of Transportation's "We foresee" litany (Winnebagos/Winnebaga, the odd makeshift raft, "a strictly temporary breakdown in the thin veneer of civilization"); the Press Secretary on how refugee can be "plausibly denied" (no curvy-horned bovines, under-20% naked-or-squalling toddlers, per Pol and Diang's Totalitarian's Guide to Iron-Fisted Spin); bovines shot on sight, free Winnie-the-Pooh toddler-wear, legal really-fast driving in south-bound breakdown lanes; n.157: Tine's "Scenarios or scenaria?" is Mario's in-tribute to the Moms — Avril whips her witch hat overhead at the line every year.
• p. 405: the strategic kicker — Tine to the doubters: who says we can't keep using the ceded territory as the continent's waste sink? "Interdependence is as Interdependence does"; the gift comes with continued U.S. waste-displacement access; "Statesmanship. Gamesmanship. Brinksmanship."
• pp. 405-407: Canada declines ("LOOK, WE'RE SWIMMING IN TERRITORY ALREADY"); Gentle's psych history surfaces; the Bethesda meltdown — morose show-tunes sung to the colonel handcuffed to the nuclear Black Box, longhorn target practice, missiles reinserted upside-down, ATHSCME "air displacement effectuators" installed facing north; Tine announces Gentle is "WILLING TO ELIMINATE OWN MAP OUT OF SHEER PIQUE."
• p. 407: the pivot: this suicide-blackmail plot "resonates powerfully" with those who know it's a "puppet-à-clef-type allusion to the dark legend of one Eric Clipperton" — the 'Ind.' sixteen-year-old who rose "some sort of human radon" in the last couple years of solar time, lending "Win or Die in the Attempt" literal new sense.
• pp. 407-408: the Glock 17 in its blond-wood Gothic-scripted case with its velvet gun-shaped concavity; the Clipperton Brigade institution (a loss to Clipperton scored like a walk in baseball, the U.S.T.A. computers neutralizing it); Clipperton v. Reat at Hartford — at 1-4 down Clipperton loads the clip, climbs the umpire's chair (n.158: jr.-tour umpires as retired principals re-exercising "some slight authority over the young"), announces his terms, and plays the rest with the Glock at his left temple (n.159: the same-hand toss perfected à la one-armed van der Hingle).
• pp. 408-409: Reat, abandoned by E.T.A. staff who hadn't bothered to attend a first-round formality, stops trying; the Courant photo of his kneeling handshake gets Elmer's-glued to Struck's door forever; "Ross Reat was never quite exactly the same ever again," per Schtitt and deLint, to deter future mercy.
• p. 409: Clipperton henceforth never loses — opponents talk on mobile phones or hit balls between their legs rather than beat him; he hefts brass-jacketed cartridges ruminatively at odd-game breaks, wins "by what is essentially psychic default," and vanishes "like the ground itself inhaled him."
• pp. 409-410: his only remote friend: eight-year-old Mario, on the circuit because Himself is shooting a two-part documentary "on jr. competitive tennis, stress, and light"; everyone else gives Clipperton the nonrecognition that "accompanies farts at formal functions"; the only available footage of "the late Eric Clipperton" — a test-cartridge from the hideous Sunkist cramp-fest in Miami — shows him trying not to smile while a withered-toddler-sized Mario, propped on his police lock, laughs homodontically at something Clipperton has just let slip; n.160: the really disturbing footage of Clipperton's suicide was designated Unviewable and interred — with the other sensitive Masters and JOI's case of special lenses — inside JOI's own roomy bronze casket in Québec, the funeral squeezed between annulation-cycles.

Backward

• The Gentle-Clipperton equation is the scene's own stated key (p. 407): national policy as suicide-blackmail = a junior with a Glock; both "wins" are meaningless because coerced — feeding the book's larger argument about hollow victories (cf. Schtitt on worthy opponents, pp. 79-85, scene 026).
• "ELIMINATE OWN MAP" enters the book's idiom here at the political register; the street register belongs to the yrstruly/Poor Tony thread (scene 040 territory, pp. 128-135) and the Eschaton debate over map vs. territory (pp. 333-342, scene 073) — three registers of self-erasure within ~70 pages.
• The ATHSCME effectuators installed facing north (p. 407) literalize what the Canadian students at the gala already feel (scene 081, p. 385) — the fans are the grievance.
• Ms. Heath's crafts-class maps and puppets continue scene 081's production credits — the whole geopolitical horror rendered in Popsicle sticks, the film's central irony-sincerity gesture.

Forward

• Clipperton's actual end is narrated at scene 089 (pp. 430-434): after Interdependence the new O.N.A.N.T.A. computer ranks him #1, the win finally "counts," and he shoots himself in a Subdorm B room with young Mario present and JOI summoned — this scene plants every element (Mario's friendship, the Glock, the meaninglessness of unrisked victory).
• n.160's casket inventory — Unviewable Masters and "his case of special lenses" buried with JOI in L'Islet, just over the border from the eastern Concavity — is a major plot landmine: it's why the A.F.R. and U.S.O.U.S. converge on exhuming Himself's head (the Gately-Hal graveyard premonition, pp. 16-17, scene 003, and p. 934, scene 175; the wraith material pp. 829-845, scene 162), and a candidate location for the Entertainment's Master.
• n.156's Tine-as-puppetmaster theory, and his slip "what Lur—" (p. 403), connect to Luria Perec's role as the A.F.R./Steeply-side femme fatale (Marathe/Steeply serial; n.268's left-handedness aside, where deLint charts left-handed and Luria is a "Québecer triple-operative"; Luria's seduction of Tine is how Québec reads U.S. policy) — Mario's kids' film quietly alleges that O.N.A.N. geopolitics runs on erotic compromise.
• The relocation-spin comedy (refugee-denial, breakdown lanes) pays off in the book's scattered Concavity-displacement lore: feral hamsters, the herds and giant infants of Gately's fever-dreams and Mario's earlier film-within (scene 071 territory), and Lucien Antitoi's Convexity-adjacent shop world.

• p. 400: "GENTLE: Hhhaaahh Hhhuuuhh." — the President reduced to pure oxygen-intake; the figurehead made literal (n.156 makes the implication explicit).
• p. 402: the Secretary of State's furious rhetorical summary ("Concede publicly that those EPA softball games weren't casual or pick-up in the least?...") — the entire conspiracy laid out in one un-deniable 'question.'
• p. 404: "We foresee a strictly temporary breakdown in the thin veneer of civilization over the souls of essentially frightened stampeding animals." — Transportation's litany; bureaucratic prose absorbing catastrophe.
• p. 407: "WILLING TO ELIMINATE OWN MAP OUT OF SHEER PIQUE" — the headline that fuses geopolitics with the book's suicide idiom; the hinge to Clipperton.
• p. 407: "whence he lent the cliché 'Win or Die in the Attempt' grotesquely literal new levels of sense" — the legend's thesis sentence.
• pp. 409-410: the test-cartridge description — Clipperton "trying not to smile" beside laughing eight-year-old Mario — the legend's lone moment of human contact; devastating in light of pp. 430-434.
• n.160 (at p. 410): the Unviewable cartridges interred in JOI's under-filled casket "yickily enough" — first-rank plot anchor for the Master-hunt and the head-exhumation premonitions.