Scene 145: afr antitoi search

Summary

Dossier-voiced account of how the A.F.R. traced the Entertainment to the Antitois — via the "regrettably fatal technical interview" of the young burglar (found through DuPlessis's pawned café-au-lait maker, n.300) and the "strenuous" interview of a cranio-facial-pain specialist — and of the methodical days-long search of the shop: every cartridge sampled by a strapped-in volunteer viewer behind a closed storage-room door, the murdered brothers rolled in construction plastic "for hygienic purposes," CLOSED/ROPAS/RELACHE signs on the door. Two damp F.L.Q. street-display cartridges with the embossed smiley prove blank — confirming Fortier and Marathe's view that the wheelchair-featuring "free samizdat" displays were hoax-terror. The section states the A.F.R.'s real objective and theory of victory: not blackmail or re-Reconfiguration but a duplicable Master, whose dissemination would force Ottawa to require Québec's secession, leaving the U.S. struck down "by its own inability to say 'Non' to fatal pleasures." A closing aside follows Fortier — absent mid-search to run the Southwest infiltration of the auteur's athlete relative — through U.S. public transit, where he refuses his prosthetic legs and savors the "solicitude that the weak substitute for respect," because the condescension "honed the edge of his senses of purpose."

What to notice

The dossier voice keeps a housekeeper's conscience — "It was a neat search and also orderly, with time taken." — the murdered brothers wrapped "for hygienic purposes"; and the search's one exemption from thoroughness is pure sentiment: Fortier, "the son of a Glen Almond glass-blower", allows no mirror to be broken while the Antitois swell in plastic one room over. Notice the calque grammar — "the room of storage" again and again, the alley's "coffre d'amas" — English worn like a prosthesis, repetition turning procedure liturgical. The volunteer-viewing protocol is the A.F.R.'s initiation game restaged indoors: the toast, the kiss on both cheeks, the promise to look after the aged father and fur-traps, a boy strapped in before an oncoming machine — every blank cartridge a train not jumped, valor rehearsed in a storage room. And the form's deep joke: the most compulsively watchable object in the world is hunted in the least watchable prose the book can produce — a scene about fatal entertainment written to be unentertaining on purpose, the flat register its narrators need in order to survive proximity.

Endnotes

• n.300 (p. 1054): the burglar was "easily found when pawning a cordless M. Café® Café-au-Lait Maker at a Brookline shop of pawning" — the A.F.R. knew DuPlessis's passion for breakfast café au lait. (The pawned loot is from the DuPlessis burglary, scene 016 — the trail that will eventually point at Gately.)
• n.301 (p. 1054): InterLace's Noreen Lace-Forché engineered all consumer cartridges Read-Only; Masters need special OS-codes, licensed hardware, and run at 585 r.p.m. vs. 450 — why "a duplicable Master" is the only strategically useful object.
• n.302 (pp. 1054-1055): Marathe has already passed the pure-malice agenda to the Office of Unspecified Services — though Fortier may have deliberately let him; and, "suspected but unknown by Marathe," Fortier plans to force Marathe to view the Entertainment before dissemination — not because he suspects the wife-motive, but because Fortier oversaw both jeux du prochain train at which Marathe's elder brothers were struck and killed, and suspects Marathe of nursing "dreams of redress." (Cross-refs n.304; see scenes/scene n304.)

Themes in this scene

• Entertainment and the Self: the Entertainment handled like fissile material — volunteer viewers as sacrificial instrumentation; the secession theory rests entirely on America's "inability to say 'Non' to fatal pleasures."
• Nationalism and O.N.A.N.: the clearest statement anywhere of A.F.R. war aims — not territory but demonstration; Québec freed by making it too dangerous to keep.
• Disability and Deformity: Fortier's prosthetics paragraph — U.S. "sensitivity" as disguised contempt, weaponized by its object; the wheelchair as both wound and credential.
• Surveillance and Disguise: technical interview, infiltration of the relative, the prostheses-jutting operative — every faction's method is the same.