Scene 089: clipperton suicide

• pp. 430-431: the paradox of Clipperton's last pre-Subsidized year — a mantel of U.S.T.A. trophies and no ranking at all, the Glock-extorted wins officially unreal; he confides only in Mario at the post-final buffets; the tactic that wins keeps the wins (and Clipperton) "from being treated as real."
• p. 431: O.N.A.N. and Subsidized Time arrive in his eighteenth summer; the barely-English-speaking Mexican systems analyst at Forest Lawn NNY treats six spring titles as sanctioned; NAJT prints E. R. Clipperton, Home Town 'Ind.', #1 Boys' Continental 18s; E.T.A. is "highly amused" and Pemulis makes a killing on vig booking wagers on whether he'll show at the Clays (n.175: the Glock-and-NAJT masturbation image's "both-hands-full logistics" — "realism wasn't really the point... for the bitter Brigade boys").
• pp. 431-432: two days before Indy, Clipperton appears at the portcullis in a frayed trench coat, gearless — "not even his Glock 17's custom-made wooden case," though the Glock itself rides concealed in the coat until p. 433 — and "in a terrible way"; Mario sways down through warm rain, interfaces through the bars, and personally lobbies L. A. Moore, prorector Cantrell, and the Headmaster; the attendant from the halfway place gets "sobriety's worst fantods, so far" off Clipperton's haunted stare at the wrought-iron racquet-head spikes.
• p. 432: Himself — "not quite strictly sober" but lucid — overrides Cantrell's and Schtitt's objections when it emerges Clipperton wants only private counsel from Incandenza Sr. (of whom, the narrator's 'I' presumes, Mario has spoken glowingly); the three go up at high noon to an unused top-floor Subdorm C room for "some sort of psycho-existential CPR-session"; Mario has never spoken of what he sat in on, not even to Hal at night.
• pp. 432-433: Rusk beeped and canceled; Lateral Alice sent to fetch Lyle (delotusing from the dispenser, his upright walk across the grounds causing student-snapshot excitement); Himself requires the session digitally recorded on Mario's head-clamped Bolex H128 to protect E.T.A. from O.N.A.N.T.A.'s "Kafkaesque rules on unregistered recipients of any sort of counsel."
• p. 433: with Lyle in transit, Clipperton produces from his wet coat an elaborately altered NAJT ranking report, a sepia snapshot of "some whey-faced Midwestern couple's wedding," and the Glock 17, and — right temple, his good stick-hand, eyes scrunched — fires; the Incandenzas stagger out "all green-gilled and red-mist-stained," preserved in snapshots (meant to catch Lyle walking) as "resembling miners of some sort of really grisly coal."
• p. 433: the poorly attended funeral — Clipperton hailed from Crawfordsville IN; the tranquilized mother and blind father had bought his story that the trophies came from a job designing tennis trophies; interment in Veedersburg's budget cemetery; Himself skips Indianapolis, takes Mario (his first funeral), and accedes to Mario's request that nothing be filmed for the jr.-tennis documentary.
• pp. 433-434: Mario — having probably told only Lyle everything — insists no one else clean the scene after Enfield's Finest chalk "a chalk ectoplasm" and the EMTs leave; it takes the bradykinetic boy all night and two bottles of Ajax Plus, the 18's girls hearing him fall and pick himself up, again and again; the spotless room locked ever since: the Clipperton Suite, Schtitt's standing object lesson for whingers.

Backward

• LaMont Chu's fame-hunger consultation with Lyle (pp. 387-390, scene 082 territory) is the live, low-grade form of the same disease Clipperton dies of; Schtitt's Clipperton Suite is the institutional answer Chu never gets from Rusk.

Forward

• Direct continuation of the Clipperton legend introduced at pp. 407-410 (scene 086); the Fresno cyanide-Quik case (pp. 436-437, scene 091) is its stated companion in the lore of "unprepared-goal-attaintment-trauma" (sic).
• The map idiom binds three worlds: Clipperton "eradicates his map" (p. 433), Eschaton's rules row has Pemulis warning that Ingersoll would "eliminate Eschaton's map for keeps" (p. 339, scene 073), and Boston AA newcomers arrive "ready to eliminate your map" (p. 446, scene 092).
• JOI counsels a suicidal boy through success-despair two years before his own 1 April YTSDB self-deletion — and is "already in and out of rehabs and hardly a credible source on much of anything"; Mario's "two funerals so far" quietly counts Himself's.
• Mario's all-night solo cleanup of human ruin sits two pages from Gately's five-A.M.s-a-week version at the Shattuck — on the 0430h Green Line whether he's just off all-night Staff duty or not (pp. 434-436, scene 090) — the book pairing its two caretaker-innocents scrubbing what others can't look at.
• The halfway-house portcullis attendant ("sobriety's worst fantods") is an early thread of the E.T.A.–Ennet House staffing connection (cf. the towel-cart girl at drills, pp. 457-458, scene 094, and Gately's world generally).
• Pemulis's odds-software killing (p. 431) is the earliest of his money schemes on record; the O.N.A.N.T.A. bureaucracy's "Kafkaesque rules" recur in the urine-testing crisis (nn.324/332).

• p. 431: "the very tactic that let him win in the first place kept the wins, and in a way Clipperton himself, from being treated as real" — the legend's whole logic in one clause.
• p. 432: "of whom I think we can presume Mario's spoken glowingly" — the communal narrator's startling first-person 'I' (often read as Hal's narration); narratological anchor.
• p. 433: "blows his legitimated brains out for real and all time, eradicates his map and then some" — the kill-line; 'legitimated' carrying the entire causality.
• p. 433: "resembling miners of some sort of really grisly coal" — the snapshot image of the stained Incandenzas.
• p. 434: "the other ways to succeed besides votaried self-transcendence and gut-sucking-in and hard daily slogging toward a distant goal you can then maybe, if you get there, live with" — Schtitt's moral; anchor passage for the-body-tennis.