Scene 148: lenz alley loot

• p. 728: confirmation in retrospect — "Sure enough the Chinkette women had been strengthless and lightweight... their bags were indeed treasure-heavy"; the bags' momentum pulls him down the alley; "His breath came easy and he could feel himself from scalp to sole"; he vaults two khaki figures sharing Sterno, "untouched" by the foul air; the alleys as "a kind of second city."
• p. 728: time fixed "somewhere vague between 2224 and 2226h"; "The alley was dark as a pocket"; the narrator's cross-stitch: "A tiny crash off somewhere south... was actually Poor Tony Krause rolling the steel waste-barrel that tripped up Ruth van Cleve."
• p. 728: the hitch boys — blue lighter-flame against the E.W.D. truck, M. Fizzy bottle for a pipe, "the sicksweet smell of overcarbonated rock," none over twelve; the knit-cap boy locks eyes and "made a gun of his thin hand, pretended to draw a slow bead"; Lenz strides by "extruding dignified purpose," keeping them "in peripheral view."
• pp. 728-729: unkind laughter and a thrown bit of brick behind him; his plans — separate valuables, fence in Little Lisbon, "refill the receptacle in his medical dictionary," attractiver shoes; the alley "devroid of cats and rodents both; he did not stop to reflect why."
• p. 729: the supine sexless figure, two different shoes, hand working in its groin, feet "turned out like a dead body's," chanting up at him "Pretty, pretty, pretty"; Lenz's whispered verdict on everyone but himself: "Jesus what a lot of fucked-up ass-eating fucking losers."

Backward

• The medical dictionary receptacle replaces/joins the razored James volume (scene 142, p. 718) — his library of hollowed-out authority continues.
• Scene 147 (p. 728) has four A.F.R. teams rolling exactly this district for "passively undefended" Subjects at exactly this hour; Lenz and the alley's supine figures are the candidate pool — this scene leaves the net closing.
• The boys' M. Fizzy bottle and the GIGABUCKS ticket (scene 141, n.299) belong to the same Subsidized-litter texture as the E.W.D. (Empire Waste Displacement) truck — waste, lottery, and rock as the gutter face of O.N.A.N.'s economy (cf. annular waste-launch lore, scene 086).
• Direct sequel to scene 142; the off-stage snatch mirrors Poor Tony's on-stage one (scenes 141/144), and the barrel-crash aside is the only narration the Ruth-Tony chase's end ever gets — two 14-Nov predation plots resolved in one another's margins (with scene 147's A.F.R. net still closing over the same alleys).
• "Devroid of cats": the alley's missing animals are Lenz's own prior work — his Issues-Resolution killings of cats, rodents, and dogs (pp. 538-560, scene 105, 109); the narrator lets the cause sit unreflected, like Lenz.

Forward

• p. 728: "His breath came easy and he could feel himself from scalp to sole." — violence as the cure for cocaine numbness (scene 142's frozen knees and nose); the predation high named.
• p. 728: the narrator's cross-POV aside ("...was actually Poor Tony Krause rolling the steel waste-barrel that tripped up Ruth van Cleve") — the book's machinery briefly visible; clear evidence of the montage construction.
• p. 729: "'Pretty, pretty, pretty.'" / "'Jesus what a lot of fucked-up ass-eating fucking losers.'" — the bottom addressing Lenz and Lenz's denial answering; the scene's whole moral transaction in two lines.