Scene 140: blood sister finale

• p. 711: the girl found "bluely dead" in her cot, habit pockets stuffed with Substances, arm "a veritable forest of syringes"; Blood Sister suspects foul play over backslide; the reversion montage — demufflered Hawg, stud-leather over the habit, unbandaged tattoos, shaken-down altar boys, jiggers with cirrhotic contacts [n.296: potassium thiocyanate + ferric chloride = 'A + B Blood,' the splatter-film F/X staple].
• pp. 711-712: the truth outs — the Mother Superior murdered the novitiate; the recursive irony that the evidence proving Blood Sister's salvation-debt discharged is inimical to the nun her own saviour is obligated to; in one scene she says fuck; a censer swung like a mace demaps a verger.
• p. 712: Act III disclosure architecture — the Vice-M.S.'s 20+ years of "hidden degenerative recidivist soul-rot," dealing Marseillese-heroin-then-Bing out of the Community Outreach Rescue Mission's little-used confessionals; the dead girl's old copping venue was that very Mission (why the non-Catholic was so adept at the Confiteor); the M.S.'s motive: silence before the girl's conversion reached truth-telling pitch [n.297: Boone reads the superfluous mute Trappists as a symbolic Greek chorus of silence — "which strikes Hal as perceptive"].
• pp. 712-713: the office free-for-all — two senior nuns teaming up on Blood Sister against the spot-lit mahogany crucifix; the upraised Champlain-era tomahawk (provenance: the Huron nun who'd decapitated Jesuits before being saved by the order's founder); the M.S.'s face "rendered indescribable in aspect by the absence of humility and the passion for truth-silencing that add up to pure and radical evil"; the Vice-M.S.'s epiphanic cold-cock with "a large decorative mahogany Christian object so symbolically obvious it needn't even be named" (Hal and Boone cringe).
• p. 713: the stand-off over the prone M.S. — the Vice-M.S.'s writhing Go-ahead expression: "complete the lapsarian circuit or whatever"; Blood Sister shrugs, drops the tomahawk (its healthy knock to the prone M.S. "presented as clearly accidental"), ironic obeisance, the long echoing walk out under the tympanum — sword, ploughshare, syringe, soup-ladle, CONTRARIA SUNT COMPLEMENTA — so heavy Hal cringes and Boone must translate for Blott [n.298: also a sly Schtitt à-clef — We Are What We Revile — though Schtitt never translates it, letting Big Buddies adjust it to the pedagogical moment].
• pp. 713-714: the ending — Blood Sister limping toughly eastward into the twittering Toronto dawn, astride the Hawg on the meanest street, expression "agnostic at best," the discount Harley-muffler sign jutting at her horizon; closing credits "the odd lime-green of bugs on a windshield."
• p. 714: ambiguous applause from Boone and Bash; "Out of nowhere Hal remembers: Smothergill"; Possalthwaite says he and the Id-man brought Blott to tell Hal about "something disturbing they encountered during their disciplinary shit-detail in the tunnels that P.M."; Hal holds up a hand, flipping through clearly-labelled cases for Low-Temperature Civics.

Backward

• Concludes the screening braided through scenes 132 and 138 (pp. 686-706); the archive's film entry ("full E.T.A. viewing ~pp. 703ff") covers 138+140.
• "Smothergill" resolves the name-block of scene 132/n.279 — the former-E.T.A. child actor (Phil Smothergill of the n.24 filmography; catalog at scene n024); the block's lifting coincides, pointedly, with the end of the father's cartridge.
• The salvation-chain-with-hidden-rot structure parodies/inverts the recovery-fellowship chains the surrounding scenes celebrate (scene 139's CA speaker, Gately's Crocodiles): the film's dread — that your saviour was never saved — set against Boston AA's own epigram "You give it up to get it back to give it away" (p. 344, scene 074).
• The Mother Superior "had eliminated the girl's map" (p. 712) / "bid adieu to her corporeal map" — demapping idiom shared with the street scenes (Lenz, yrstruly) and tagged maps-territory elsewhere; here it stays genre-pastiche.

Forward

• The tunnel-detail boys' "something disturbing" (p. 714): the Possalthwaite/Arslanian/Blott Eschaton-fallout punishment crew, last seen hauling bags to the dumpsters during the Stice match (scene 130, p. 680); their report is never delivered on the page, and Blott's tunnel ordeal itself sits backward at scene 129 (pp. 666-673); the detail feeds the E.T.A.-tunnels uncanny that culminates in Hal-under-ground and Gately's dream-cartography.
• The agnostic-ending freeze (relapse horizon under the muffler sign) mirrors the novel's own refusal of closure — the JOI-film aesthetic ("anti-confluential") Hal will name in later scenes (pp. 944, scene 179ff).

• p. 712: the confessional drug-operation disclosure ("covertly operating a high-volume retail operation out of the order's Community Outreach Rescue Mission's little-used confessionals") — the film's sacrilege-of-sponsorship core.
• p. 713: the M.S.'s face — "the absence of humility and the passion for truth-silencing that add up to pure and radical evil" — JOI's moral equation; silence as the radical evil (pair with the wraith's figurant horror, pp. 834-839).
• p. 713: "complete the lapsarian circuit or whatever" and the shrugged, dropped tomahawk — annularity refused; key extraction.
• p. 713: the tympanum — "a sword and a ploughshare and a syringe and a soup-ladle and the motto CONTRARIA SUNT COMPLEMENTA" — with n.298's Schtitt à-clef; theme-motto for the whole book.
• p. 714: "Out of nowhere Hal remembers: Smothergill." / the tunnel-detail boys waiting with something disturbing — two plot-doors clicking open in the scene's last breath.

Endnotes digested here

• n.296 (p. 1054): potassium thiocyanate mixes 5/1 with ferric chloride to produce 'A + B Blood,' low-budget splatter's F/X staple.
• n.297 (p. 1054): Boone — "a lazy student but very bright girl" — reads the mute Trappists as symbolic rather than narrative, a Greek chorus of silence; Hal finds it perceptive.
• n.298 (p. 1054): CONTRARIA SUNT COMPLEMENTA as Schtitt-directed à-clef ("We Are What We Revile, or We Are What We Scurry Around As Fast As Possible With Our Eyes Averted"); Schtitt never translates or moralizes it, letting prorectors and Big Buddies fit it to the pedagogical moment.