Scene 123: steeply father mash

• p. 638: caps header 1 MAY Y.D.A.U.; Steeply's scratch now ugly and puffed; the whiter band on his finger — "a university ring, or more probably a wedding band," removed — and the unfixed "annular pallor" that "seemed curious to Marathe"; "My own father... We watched him get consumed with a sort of entertainment."
• p. 639: "nothing like this sort of Entertainment — a plain old television program"; MAS*H "an acronym, not a command"; Thursdays at 2100h, supper on a tray, Mummykins teasing — "It seemed almost cute"; Steeply volunteers a files-tidbit for M. Fortier (Steeply, H.H.: late father a Cheery Oil dispatcher, Troy NY); then syndication — old episodes chopped, loaded with ads, running daily on two Capital District stations — "I think this was the start."
• p. 640: a small TV kept down at the distributorship; the gradual immersion — quits the bowling league, drops out of Knights of Columbus, hunched "head out, as if pulled toward the screen"; Marathe grimly recognizes the viewing posture from his second-oldest brother and the Canadiens of the N.L. of H.
• p. 641: ugly if he missed even one episode; "The organism of family simply shifted to accommodate"; the notebook appears — "the secrecy about the notebook, and the secrecy about the secrecy"; Marathe names the crazy-making gradualness: the watcher of the obsessed comes to doubt his own balance; Marathe angles his chair to find his shadow blunt, deformed, "pathetic and small" — no Bröckengespenstphänom at dawn.
• pp. 641-642: the father quotes scenes to make conversational points, then can't converse at all "without some system of references to the program"; kitchen = Mess Tent, den = the Swamp; rents films for cameo appearances; buys a "Betamixer" (n.263) and tapes all 29 weekly airings, cross-referenced in baroque non-date systems; moves his bedding to the den; views all night with a crude white earplug, scribbling.
• p. 642: dawn description — the sun "slowly exhaled" from the Rincons, light "the vague red of a type of fond sentiment"; Steeply's standing shadow cast back close enough for Marathe to touch; "It sometimes from somewhere blue occurred to Marathe that he did not dislike this Steeply, though like or respect would be too far in going, to say."
• p. 643: Mummykins finds letters in the garbage addressed to Major Burns — not to the actor Maury Linville, but to the character, at "an involved military address, with a Seoul routing code"; the letters "hostile, savage, and lavishly descriptive"; Burns as embodiment of an Armageddon-theme assembling itself across the seasons; Burns/"burns" = "the consuming fire of apocalypse"; she never mentions them — just leaves them around where the kids will see.
• pp. 643-644: missing whole weeks of work; Mo Cheery views tapes with him, then collars Mummykins in the garage — the old man is "in a high-angle psychic nose-dive"; she acts as if she has no idea what Mo means; "Mumkinsky being a type of pet family name," Steeply says, embarrassed.
• p. 644: the theories metastasize — coded communication "about an end to our familiar type of world-time and the advent of a whole different order of world-time"; the Police Action lasted two-odd years, the show was in its seventh; "baroquoco" theories about what "really" happened to departed characters.
• pp. 644-645: letters now mailed, returned stamped undeliverable from absurd addresses; "Mummykins was uncomplaining throughout... She did, granted, begin taking prescription anti-anxiety medication"; Marathe's unsaid "Land of the freely brave"; the secret book "that revised and explicated much of the world's military, medical, philosophical and religious history" by MAS*H thematics; oil customers complain of bizarre theoretical discussions.
• p. 645: the B.S. 1983 double blow — attorneys for CBS and Fox cite letters of "grave concern," and the final episode runs; the father refuses to leave the den ("As in even to go to the bathroom, now," p. 646).
• p. 646: A.C.D.C. cable for extra syndication, tapes running constantly, haggard and spectral; he dies in the chair at full Recline during the episode where Alda's sleepwalking Hawkeye is reassured that if he were truly crazy he'd sleep like the notorious Burns; scores of notebooks tumble from a forced closet — the manuscript in indecipherable medical/military code; Marathe's moral ("An otherwise harmless U.S.A. broadcast television program took his life") is flatly refused: "No. It was a transmural infarction." "The obsessed frequently endure."
• p. 646: sunrise full: "All was calm. All was bright" (Silent Night, deadpan); Steeply admits the temptation — "part of both the horror and the pull" — when he thinks of Flatto's lab; "I kind of half-picture Hank Hoyne in the old man's old recliner, hunched and scribbling feverishly"; the eyes were alike.
• pp. 646-647: heat shimmer; Tucson resumes "the appearance of the mirage"; Marathe asks Steeply to depart first — pride about concealing how he gets up and down; Steeply squats to adjust the straps of his high heels, prostheses misaligned.
• p. 647: the closing exchange on the victims' eyes — Dick Willis's "empty of intent" doesn't capture it; not inanimate, "More like the opposite... Stuck. Fixed. Held. Trapped. As in trapped in some sort of middle. Between two things. Pulled apart in different directions."
• pp. 647-648: Marathe: "Meaning between different cravings of great intensity, this" — and the reply ("Not even cravings so much. Emptier than that... As if there was something he'd forgotten") begins the seamless dissolve into scene 124 (see Connections).

Backward

• Serial continuity: same night as scenes 029/031/033/035/038/072/077/088/096/098 etc.; this is the sunrise end-stage (Marathe's giant entrancing shadow from the serial's start — cf. the Bröckengespenstphänom installments — has shrunk to "pathetic and small," p. 641).
• Hank Hoyne and Flatto's lab: directly continues the B.S.S. Entertainment-casualty material of scenes 098 (pp. 489-491, Master-copy temptation, Flatto's holography/density theories) and 101 (pp. 507-508, Hoyne "empty of intent" — phrase here attributed to Dick Willis and found wanting).
• The recliner-death replays the medical attaché's recliner (scenes 007/011/014/025/028) — viewer fixed in the chair, family organizing around the screen; the MAS*H father is the attaché avant la lettre.
• "An acronym, not a command" — boyhood confusion over whether the title MAS*H ordered you to mash; cf. the book's running anxiety about what entertainment commands its viewer to do.
• The father's theories of "a whole different order of world-time" land ironically in a novel where time itself has been sold (Subsidized Time, scene 059); apocalypse-by-entertainment is precisely the A.F.R.'s plan being negotiated on this mountainside.

Forward

• The 123→124 dissolve (deliberate, Wallace's seam): the scene's last exchange runs without any break into scene 124 — "Not even cravings so much. Emptier than that... 'Misplaced. Lost.' 'Misplaced.' 'Lost.' 'Misplaced.' 'As you wish.'" (p. 648) — and only then does the 13 NOVEMBER header cut to Kate Gompert and Geoffrey Day at Ennet House discussing the same phenomenology of inner horror. The archive's 123/124 scene division falls inside this dissolve; scene 124's first ~5 dialogue lines are shared tissue with this scene. Read the closing lines as completing Marathe/Steeply and as overture to Gompert/Day: stuck-between-cravings (Entertainment victims) blends into Day's billowing shape (psychotic depression) — Wallace equating the two voids.
• Steeply's removed band (p. 638) sits with the wife of his tennis memories (scene 127, p. 658) and the "recent divorce" of the Marital-Leave material (scene 035, p. 107; scene 077, p. 375).
• Endnote n.263 (p. 1046): one line — "Sic, presumably for Betamax (®Sony)" — flagging Steeply's "Betamixer" as the narrator's sic; n.264 (p. 1046): "Sic, but it's pretty obvious what Marathe means here," re Marathe's "recircling" for recycling. Both notes certify that the dialogue's errors are the characters' own.

• p. 638: "It seemed curious to Marathe that Steeply would undergo electrolysis but not take trouble to fix his finger's annular pallor" — the ring's white circle: annularity stamped on the disguised body; anchor passage for surveillance-disguise.
• p. 640: "The gradual immersion. The withdrawal from life." — the anecdote's whole arc in two fragments; entertainment as addiction, plainly.
• p. 641: "the secrecy about the notebook, and the secrecy about the secrecy" — recursive concealment; cf. Hal's Pump Room secrecy-attachment (scene 013).
• p. 643: the Major Burns letters paragraph ("hostile, savage, and lavishly descriptive... a Seoul routing code") — the collapse of fiction/reality distinctions; entertainment-self's terminal stage.
• p. 645: "It was enough to break your heart. She was a rock. She did, granted, begin taking prescription anti-anxiety medication." — American stoicism with a pharmaceutical asterisk; followed by Marathe's swallowed "Land of the freely brave."
• p. 646: "He died in his easy chair, set at full Recline" — the recliner-death image binding the father to the attaché and every Entertainment victim.
• p. 647: "Stuck. Fixed. Held. Trapped. As in trapped in some sort of middle. Between two things. Pulled apart in different directions." — the book's diagnosis of its victims' eyes; essential anthology passage, and the hinge of the dissolve into Gompert/Day.