Scene 149: marathe ennet waiting room

• pp. 729-730: the cult-survivors' antiphony — Ones fed to the stove on the knees ("an extra slap if the currency was new"), the pushed Rolls, embraced snake-nature and barbed-wire slithering, "too cleansed to stay... too much love somehow to take. — Plus I was up to three bags a day, at the end"; wood chopped with the teeth, "Yours let you keep your teeth?" "Only the ones for gnawing. See?"
• p. 730: Marathe situated — veiled, last demi-maison of his list, the ramp noted; the living room "resembled an anthill which had been stirred with a stick"; the martial-arts cartridge, the pale man miming kicks at the inutile wheelchaired woman's head; "a man without hands and feet trying to negotiate the stairway."
• pp. 730-731: applicant vomiting in the shrubberies; the scuttling man and the leather hooligans' jumping game; the girl who seems to remove her eye and place it in her mouth; no other veils — and nobody finds his unusual; the whispered idiom "Pet the dogs" / "Make sure and pet the dogs."
• p. 731: the cover ensemble — Desjardins's turtleneck under a sportcoat (the dead volunteer's clothes); the compulsive fake sniffing Pat later reads as coming "from nowhere" (scene 151, p. 748); the recited line and its hardest reception: "How extraordinarily nice for you" (necktied Day, sarcasm detected).
• pp. 731-732: Day's "portable" disquisition with the eye-girl and the shoe-polishing necktie man — "with respect to a functional car it is I who am portable"; "I'll buy that, Day."
• p. 732: the glaring smoker; Marathe's credo — "prepared to die violently at any time, which rendered him free to choose among emotions," a freedom Steeply confirmed Americans can't comprehend; the rotted-log memory of his four-limbed childhood "before Le Culte du Prochain Train" (n.304 — the train cult that took his legs); the man's pallor matched to the under-log writhers.
• pp. 732-733: Selwyn closes in — shotgun-holed 501s, grave-illness sweat (Broullîme's trans-3-methyl-2 hexenoic acid lecture recalled), "the vacant intensity of those who have violently died"; "You real?... You're real I can tell ain't you."
• pp. 733-734: the metal-people doctrine — micro-thin organic layer, "Heads full of parts," the unsuppressible whir ("Get right up close... Not a sound" — proving Marathe real); Marathe's deadpan counterpoint: "I am Swiss." / "I have no six." / "The Swiss, we are a quiet people, and reserved. In addition, I am deformed."
• pp. 734-735: the cosmology completes — "They pro—ject... The real world's one room... There's only 26 total. They play different characters, that you think you know"; the count includes "the one without feet on the stairs"; "You ain't here."
• pp. 735-736: the Office opens — a limping, listing, blond-stereotype-attractive "addicted patient" emerges with the clipboard authority; "Physically challenged foreign person with unpronounceable name!"; Marathe rolls over "as slowly as possible, hunched... and pathetically tacking," extends a hand he makes tremble; Selwyn's parting shots: "You only think you're goin' someplace!" and "Make sure and pet the dogs!"

Backward

• "Prepared to die violently at any time... free to choose among emotions" extends Marathe's mountainside doctrine of chosen attachments (scenes 029/035/072/088); Steeply's verification ties it to their serial.
• Desjardins's turtleneck: the dead viewer of scene 147 dressed onto the spy — the cell literally wears its sacrifices.

Forward

• Direct product of Fortier's canvass orders (scene 147, pp. 725-728); continues into scenes 151 and 153 (the Office interview). The "addicted patient" who limps out is Pat Montesian — Marathe's misread, corrected at p. 747, is the hinge of scene 151.
• Selwyn's machine-people rant resonates with the "witness" bum's machine-like jerkiness around Kate (scene 141) and with the book's figurant theory (Hal on figurants, scene ~pp. 835ff); his "one room... pro—jections" is a street-grade Cave allegory pointing at the Entertainment's viewers locked in single rooms (scenes 007ff, 147).
• "Pet the dogs" pays off in the Office: Pat's dogs at her desk (scene 151, pp. 747-749) — house-lore about intake strategy; Day's presence links to his Ennet House discourses (scene 066) and his surveillance erudition cited by Lenz (scene 142).
• The handless/footless man = Burt F. Smith (scene 074, the White Flag Xmas-Eve mugging story); the inutile woman = Mrs. Lopate, named in scene 153 (p. 753).

• pp. 729-730: the cult duet ("Our cult burned money for fuel... I finally felt too cleansed to stay... Plus I was up to three bags a day, at the end") — cold-open dialogue with no dialogue tags; recovery-room oral history at its purest.
• p. 732: "Marathe was prepared to die violently at any time, which rendered him free to choose among emotions." — core Marathe; anchor passage for the freedom/choice complex.
• pp. 733-735: Selwyn's whisper-doctrine ("There's a micro-thin layer of skin. But underneath, it's metal... You ain't here... The real world's one room.") — the solipsism theme's terminal case; essential extraction.
• pp. 735-736: "'Physically challenged foreign person with unpronounceable name!'" — institutional U.S. sensitivity-speak as comedy, rhyming with Fortier's solicitude critique (scene 145, p. 723).