IJ study archive

Scene 121: afr snatches wyyy engineer

Scene
121
Pages
620–626
When
a gray weekday c. mid-Nov YDAU (2009), morning (the annual Public Gardens pond-draining)
Where
Boston Public Gardens (drained duck pond; Arlington St. hillside) and the State House Annex, Beacon & Joy Sts., 8th floorin: Downtown Boston
POV
3rd person, roving: essayistic narrator → Rodney Tine at the window → the WYYY student engineer

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Open questions this scene bears on

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 8)

Summary

An essayistic panorama of YDAU home-spectation culture — teleputers, killer apps, "an entertainment-market of sofas and eyes" — pivots to its dialectical product: "spect-ops," the millennial hunger to stand in live crowds watching anything at all, of which the annual unannounced draining of the Public Gardens duck pond is a top Back Bay specimen. Rodney Tine watches the pond's concentric rings from a State House Annex window all morning, a silent war-council (Steeply and Tine Jr. included) seated behind him. On the Gardens' far hillside the WYYY student engineer suns his acne on a NASA blanket among huddled homeless forms, mourning Madame Psychosis's vanishing from the air; all he knows of her — long-term Treatment, "only half a house" in a low-rent part of metro Boston, gleaned from Molly Notkin — is "shortly" to be exactly what he wishes he knew more of. Two anonymous white vans take position, and a legless, fleur-de-lis-masked A.F.R. operative in a snowplow-scooped wheelchair rockets down the slope and scoops the engineer into the lower van's open maw, under the Chief of Unspecified Services' literal nose.

What to notice

The essay swallows the thriller: after pages arguing that home spectation secretes a hunger for live watching, the kidnapping arrives in the essay's own apparatus — a "Q.v." — filed as one more exhibit, and the reader, who has been milling with the crowd all scene, is caught being exactly the spectator the essay diagnosed. Notice the posture-system the hillside runs on: the homeless forms are "Curled on their sides, knees drawn up, unopen to anything. In other words huddled.", while the engineer alone lies "splayed, wholly open to the weak sun" — and it is the one open body that gets scooped; the scene makes openness itself the catchable posture. The snatch is a single sentence going as fast as the chair, but its final clause swerves away from the victim entirely and lands on the vomiting man clipped by the runaway cart, "holding the parts that were hit" — collateral pain no crowd collects for, the quiet counter-exhibit to the whole spect-op economy. And the Bread & Circus cart with its "ingeniously convenient little calculator", repurposed as a destitute man's ballast and demolished as slapstick, is the essay's cruelest prop.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 620: the YDAU catalog — InterLace, R.I.S.C. power-TPs, Yushityu nanoprocessors, killer apps; carpal neuralgia and lumbar stressae; half of metro Boston working at home; Tawni Kondo's 0700h mass calisthenics (the Chinese at least assembled publicly); "(get this) 94% of all O.N.A.N.ite paid entertainment now absorbed at home."
  • p. 620: "Saying this is bad is like saying traffic is bad" — nobody calls bad what no one can imagine being without; "Total freedom, privacy, choice."
  • pp. 620-621: hence spect-ops — Gapers' Blocks, W.D.V. splats drawing studious milling rings, street musicians commuting in foreign autos, the 0000h car-switch as nightly spectacle, panhandling verging on stand-up; crowds held by "an almost seemingly nucleic force"; "a mass of eyes all not at home."
  • pp. 621-622: the November pond-draining — always a gray raw windy day; planes möbiusizing Depend banners overhead; Tine at the 8th-floor window, massaging his coccyx above pond, crowd, and trucks.
  • p. 622: JOI, "almost a scopophile about spect-ops and crowds," never missed a draining; Hal, Mario, and Ennet residents have been ("some of them weren't in much of a position to remember").
  • pp. 622-623: behind ruminative Tine sit silent a stenographer, aide, Deputy Mayor, the Mass. D.S.A.S. Director, and Operatives Tine Jr. (n.257: NNE Region, careful not to fidget) and Steeply (n.258: Desert-SW Region, massive peasant skirt, sensible flats); Frisbees float on the far ridge in Tine's "specular vision."
  • pp. 623-624: the engineer supine cruciform on his space blanket on the copless hillside; three dozen huddled forms "like firewood before it's been gathered"; his inhaler, glasses, M. Fizzy, spine-split Metallurgy of Annular Isotopes; a half-waxed white van with HANDICAPPED plates parks below.
  • pp. 624-625: why he's here — since Madame's leave he can't bear the Union roof; the substitute "Miss Diagnosis" a crushing disappointment; he's paid to monitor a live mike through 60 noiseless minutes; "Silence of presence v. silence of absence, maybe. The silences on the tapes are the worst"; bent, damaged listeners come down to inquire, apologizing to someone "they can clearly see is not even there."
  • p. 625: Notkin's tape-retrieval visit = the precise total of his knowledge (Treatment, "half a house"); "He is shortly to have occasion to wish he knew a great deal more"; the second van crests the ridge, ramp out; the Frisbee players vanish — "an eerie stillness like a reef when a shark cruises through."
  • pp. 625-626: the wheelchair shoots down, "a madly squeaking brass-colored blur," welded scoop out front, the legless figure masked fleur-de-lis-with-sword-stem and bent for a skier's speed; it slaloms the huddled forms, clips the calculator-cart into the vomiting man, scoops engineer + blanket + book, and bears him — "a hallucinatory waggle of bare limbs and strangely wheezy shrieks" — down into the curbside van whose ramp slides out "like a tongue or Autoteller's transaction-receipt"; the NASA blanket twists coruscant over Arlington St.; the hillside barely stirs.

Themes in this scene

  • Entertainment and the Self: the book's definitive spect-op essay — total home spectation ("sofas and eyes") secreting its opposite, crowds desperate to watch anything live; the unanswerable "what no one can imagine being without."
  • Communication and Solipsism: the "floating no-space world of personal spectation"; silence-of-presence vs. silence-of-absence; broken listeners inquiring after a person who was only ever a voice.
  • Nationalism and O.N.A.N.: an A.F.R. snatch in a Boston park while the U.S. Chief of Unspecified Services convenes upstairs; Depend banners over a drained public pond — Subsidized Time advertising the sky.
  • Disability and Deformity: the wheelchair weaponized; the Québec-flag mask on a legless assassin; HANDICAPPED plates as cover; the misshapen inquirers at the station.
  • Surveillance and Disguise: paired half-waxed anonymous vans; Steeply in the Helen persona even at a federal table; Tine's "specular vision" of the Gardens missing the only operation that matters.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • The kidnapping is the A.F.R.'s Madame Psychosis hunt: the engineer's "half a house" knowledge is the thread leading them toward Ennet House and Joelle — companion op to the Antitoi raid (scene 097, pp. 481-489) in the search for the Entertainment's Master.
  • The opening tech-catalog reprises scene 017's YDAU catalog (p. 60) — the annual-upgrade litany as era-marker.
  • "Spect-op" is the very word used at Enfield Marine (scene 120, p. 611, catatonics staring at the fight); the 0000h car-switch theorized here is dramatized there, the same week.
  • JOI the scopophile of crowds (p. 622): the auteur of fatal watching attended mass watchings — feeds film-optics readings of the Entertainment's genesis.
  • Madame Psychosis's show and this engineer: scene 053; her absence = the freebase suicide attempt (pp. 219-240) and Ennet entry 8 Nov YDAU (n.134 ruling); Mario's parallel grief for the show (pp. 589-590).

Forward

  • Notkin as information leak prefigures her full debriefing by Steeply (pp. 788-795, scene 159).
  • Tine's council extends the Tine/Steeply apparatus of scene 045 (pp. 142-144) and frames Steeply's concurrent E.T.A. embed (scene 122, the peasant-skirted Moment profiler).
  • The chair's mad squeaking ties the A.F.R.'s signature sound to the train-cult origins — see scenes/scene n304.

Notable passages (6)
  • p. 620: "an entertainment-market of sofas and eyes" — the economy of spectation in six words; core anthology passage.
  • p. 620: "Saying this is bad is like saying traffic is bad..." — the normalization argument the novel contests.
  • p. 621: "a mass of eyes all not at home, all out in the world and pointed the same way" — communal watching as inverted home-viewing.
  • pp. 624-625: "Silence of presence v. silence of absence, maybe. The silences on the tapes are the worst." — absence theorized.
  • p. 625: "He is shortly to have occasion to wish he knew a great deal more." — rare hard prolepsis; the trap closing.
  • pp. 625-626: the single-breath kidnapping sentence ("Q.v. also the wheelchair...") — syntax accelerating with the chair.

What links here Manuscript differences (1) · Timeline events here (17) · Connected from (4) · Passages quoted here (30) · Motifs (7)

Manuscript differences

Timeline events here

Connected from

Passages quoted here

Motifs