ATHSCME

Corporate name of the giant industrial air-displacement fans manufactured in Enfield; the in-text expansion is "The ATHSCME Family of Air-Displacement Effectuators," glossed in the same breath as "(meaning they make really big fans)" (p. 241). White-suited ATHSCME crews erect and service the tennis academy's inflatable winter dome, the Lung (p. 52); the border array of displacement fans blows the reconfigured territory's airborne oxides and toxins north into Canada (p. 385) — the aerial counterpart to the E.W.D. waste catapults — audible across metro Boston as a low faraway trill (p. 611) and shut off nightly for de-linting (p. 543). A recurring threat target: the A.F.R. demand cessation of all "ATHSCME rotary air mass displacement activity" within 175 kilometers of Canadian soil (endnote 304, p. 1057) and threaten to blow up ATHSCME towers (endnote 110, p. 1015); in Mario Incandenza's ONANtiad puppet-film a mock headline has President Gentle threatening to "IRRADIATE CANADA W/ AID OF ATHSCME HELL-FANS" (p. 407). What the letters stand for is never revealed and remains an open crux; the readings that circulate in general online discussion — a pun on the real public-sector union AFSCME, an ACME cartoon-supplier sight gag, "asthma" or a lisped "ask me," a MATCHES anagram, and the counter-observation that DFW punctuates true initialisms with periods (E.T.A., U.S.A.) but writes ATHSCME with none — are all unresolved.