Scene 097: aventura antitoi afr raid

• p. 475: the princess-and-pea food revolt — Amy J.'s Red Dye #4 migraines and her Xanax "vapor trail" prognosis (the [n.199] callout hangs on the Xanax) and vegetarian Joelle ("rather eat a bug"); Pat's incredible indulgence (Big Red Soda Water, menial-job exemption noises); "Gately has long since quit trying to figure Pat Montesian out"; weird weather, thunder plus spitting snow.
• pp. 476-477: the honesty weak spot — indirect routes, lunatic driving rationalized as metro-Boston norm; "Progress Not Perfection"; The Unexamined Life club and the Brighton Projects, both places he "no longer goes"; racing the Inbound Green train at 75 kph as "a dark vestige of his old low-self-esteem suicidal-thrill behaviors"; the square indestructible head and Prince Valiant carpet-remnant hair (n.200: Chandler Foss's analysis); ex-burglar's eye still cataloguing bars and alarm-foil (n.201).
• pp. 477-478: B.U. country — cream-cheese foreheads, nonaddicted girls, "the weird hopelessness at the heart of lust"; almost two years celibate, never yet sober sex or dancing; wet dreams at twenty-nine; the menthol-cigarette self-sabotage scheme that backfired; the asbestos-stripped basement Staff room.
• pp. 478-479: the Storrow 500 (n.202's metro-argot gloss) to Inman Square's Little Lisbon — Gately's pro-American unease, Brazilians and the proximity of cocaine, the COMPLETE DESTRUCTION OF CONFIDENTIAL RECORDS storefront, the tentacled take-out memory.
• p. 479: the pivot — Gately blows through Inman; the backwash raises "an odd little tornado" of leaflets, glassine bags, a syringe's husk, and a flattened Millennial Fizzy cup that twirls in his wake and raps the pane of 'Antitoi Entertainent' (n.203: sic) "with a sound for all the world like the rap of a knuckle"; ammo-belted Lucien answers, finding no one.
• pp. 480-481: the Antitoi cell profiled — back room of cots, weaponry, CQBC radio, soupe aux pois; Bertraund the default brains, Lucien one of the only Québécois alive who can't understand French; F.L.Q. spurned them after their patron DuPlessis's "burglary-and-mucus" martyrdom; their sad insurgency (brick-taped reply-cards, Gentle doormats); the Bellow's Falls VT crossing of the Convexity with glass, brooms, ordnance, and low-demand cartridges; the gag-and-notions stock itself trucked from Acmé Inc. of Waltham at a "politically motivated discount" — the Québec-sympathetic Albertan mogul's covert subsidy (n.204).
• pp. 481-482: the barter backstory — the V-flashing sixties relic trades "eighteen unexceptional-looking and old lozenges" claimed to be "650 mg. of" a discontinued "trop-formidable" psychedelic (plus a waste-bag of crusty unlabeled cartridges) for a lava-lamp and Lucien's beloved lavender apothecary's mirror; the drenching-sweat-proof-ink warning.
• pp. 482-483: Lucien at the pane with the broom he carved as a boy in the 1993 Gaspé blizzards — "that rare spinal appreciation for beauty in the ordinary that nature seems to bestow on those who have no native words for what they see"; the mirrored shoproom; his cartridge-inventory memory; Saturday's haul including the display cartridges stamped IL NE FAUT PLUS QU'ON PURSUIVE LE BONHEUR with a disembodied-smile arc — blank on his 450-rpm viewer (n.205: Masters need a 585-rpm drive and read blank on conventional players; q.v. n.301).
• pp. 483-485: the squeaks — wheelchaired figures multiplying outside the Portuguese grocery; the dawning horror that the squeaking isn't the bolted door's hinge (n.206: 'to hear the squeak' as Canada's darkest euphemism for violent de-mapping); the A.F.R. glyph remembered; Lucien draws the.44, zipper-thread snags, his pants fall; one wild shot shatters a display mirror, replacing a masked A.F.R.'s reflection with a "jagged stelliform hole."
• pp. 485-486: the back room — Bertraund seated at supper with a rusty railroad spike through his right eye; six to nine masked A.F.R.s; the leader in sportcoat, tie, cerise gloves, and a plain yellow smily-face mask, dipping Bertraund's baguette in his soup; "'n soir, 'sieur"; the knee-wallop that drops Lucien into "a supplicant's posture."
• pp. 486-487: the leader's terms — they require, without delay, the "Copy-Capable" entertainment item, the Master, and a 585-rpm TP; Lucien's vigorous incomprehension reads as refusal; the gun pegged at dead Bertraund's head; the black zipper-thread connecting kneeling Lucien, his hidden gun, and his brother's ear in one surreal filament.
• pp. 487-489: the execution — Lucien's lips quiver "in an attempt to form words. Words that are not and can never be words" (n.207: he intuits his lone French phrase wouldn't help); the cleric-collared interviewer drives the whittled broom-tip down his throat in strokes timed to "In-U-Tile"; the dying interior vision of the Gaspé — snow, mother's red kind face, lakes "like chips of broken glass… gleaming, and the river Ste.-Anne a ribbon of light, unspeakably pure"; skewered upright "completely skewered" at a police-lock's angle; and the release — Lucien "finds his gut and throat again and newly whole, clean and unimpeded, and is free, catapulted home over fans and the Convexity's glass palisades at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear and nearly maternal alarmed call-to-arms in all the world's well-known tongues."

Backward

• The eighteen lozenges (claimed 650 mg total) from the sixties relic (pp. 481-482) are the DMZ: this is the supply from which Bertraund sells Pemulis his tablets (pp. 211-219, scene 057-orbit) — meaning the drug shadowing Hal's endgame and the Entertainment's Master pass through the same doomed shop.
• DMZ-count contradiction, as printed: this scene's "eighteen unexceptional-looking and old lozenges" claimed at "650 mg." (pp. 481-482) vs. scene 057's "thirteen incredibly potent 50-mg. artifacts" totaling 650 mg (p. 216; 13 × 50 = 650) — novel-internal; recorded in the archive's catalog (Carlisle C07 reads the barter as 650 mg TOTAL).

Forward

• Seam with scene 095: "Then tonight…" continues the cooking/errand frame directly; Joelle's arrival (8 Nov, n.134 ruling) gives Gately his first sustained notice of the "weirdly-familiar-but-Southernish-sounding girl" — the start of the Gately-Joelle thread that carries through the Lenz night, the hospital chapters, and their late intimacy (pp. 595ff, 824ff, 855ff).
• The trash-tornado knock (p. 479) is the book's signature causal splice: Gately's wake literally knocks on the A.F.R.'s target's door minutes before the raid, prefiguring his fatal entanglement with the Nucks (the Nuck-VIP burglary of scene 016, pp. 55-60; the .44-Bulldog night at pp. 601-619) — waste, cars, and Québec converging on him again.
• The smiley-stamped, blank-reading display cartridges (p. 483; n.205, q.v. n.301) read blank on a conventional drive — the tell of a Copy-Capable Master, n.205's own distinction (Read-Onlys play anywhere) — looted from the razzle displays near the Shaw statue (the Berkeley/Boston razzle provenance is Marathe's line at p. 490, scene 098): the A.F.R.'s "Copy-Capable item" is plausibly already on Lucien's shelves. The shop subsequently becomes the A.F.R.'s Cambridge headquarters and testing site (pp. 719-728), where Fortier's crew views captives' cartridges — retroactively supporting the smily-masked leader's identification as Fortier.
• DuPlessis's "burglary-and-mucus mishap" (p. 481) closes the loop with Gately's darker issue in scene 095 (pp. 462-463) — the A.F.R. hunting the burglars' haul is the same engine that later sends Nucks to Ennet House's neighborhood.
• The squeak motif (pp. 484-485; n.206) is immediately, eerily echoed in the very next section's squeaking-mattress obsession of JOI's father ("areas that gibber and squeak… rats," pp. 491-493, scene 099/) — the book rhyming assassins' wheels with a father's mania; A.F.R. squeaks recur whenever they near (e.g., around E.T.A. and Ennet House later, pp. 845ff orbit).
• Lucien's soul "soaring north… sounding a… call-to-arms in all the world's well-known tongues" (p. 489) joins the book's ghost-economy — anticipating JOI's wraith (pp. 829, scene 162ff), who likewise gains in death the communication denied in life; the freed-of-the-body's-suit phrasing recurs in the wraith chapters.
• Gately passing "The Unexamined Life club… where he no longer goes" (p. 476) seeds the club's later appearances in the Lenz/Green night walks (pp. 577, scene 116ff); the Allston Group's Riley's Roast Beef likewise recurs.

• p. 475: "the weirdly-familiar-but-Southernish-sounding girl Joelle van D. with the past-believing bod and the linen face" — Gately's first real registration of Joelle; 'weirdly familiar' is the Madame-Psychosis-radio seed.
• p. 477: "the weird hopelessness at the heart of lust." — eight words doing a chapter's work on sober desire (in the B.U.-girls paragraph beginning "Arm out like a hack's arm").
• p. 479: "the tornado of waste does, moving behind him…" — the single immense sentence carrying the Millennial Fizzy cup to the Antitois' door; the book's causality made visible.
• p. 482: "He has that rare spinal appreciation for beauty in the ordinary that nature seems to bestow on those who have no native words for what they see." — Lucien's epitaph in advance.
• pp. 484-485: "how can a door's upper hinge loudly squeak when the door is tightly closed…" — the squeak's horror-turn; with n.206's euphemism gloss.
• p. 487: "Words that are not and can never be words are sought by Lucien here…" — the communication-solipsism thesis at the moment of his death.
• pp. 488-489: "and Lucien finally dies… catapulted home over fans and the Convexity's glass palisades at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear and nearly maternal alarmed call-to-arms in all the world's well-known tongues." — the death-release sentence; one of the book's great endings-of-sections.