Samizdat thread

Arc

The samizdat's whole career is a joke about appetite, told twice — once by the man who made it and once by the nations that fight over it. James Incandenza comes to the final cartridge as an optics man "of the Hostile School" whose filmography had rehearsed visual lethality for years: holographic Medusas turning live audiences to stone, spectators swelling into "gigantic eyeballs in chairs" (1). What he actually shoots, per the one performer, is almost nothing — a glass revolving door, and a woman in white leaning over a wobbling neonatal lens apologizing for twenty minutes, the price of her unveiled face being that he put down the bottle (2). She never sees the result, doubts it was even coherent, and is left holding the question the whole thread then asks at scale: "a cage or really a door?" (3). Ninety days later he is dead without a note; his testament orders "the Masters of everything unreleased" into the brass casket with him (4); and the film's documentary existence shrinks to one filmography entry — "'Madame Psychosis'; no other definitive data," the Master "either destroyed or vaulted sui testator" (5). Everything that follows is two governments contending over an object whose very existence is an archival rumor.

Then the rumor starts killing people. A Canadian-born medical attaché opens a plain brown case with a smiling face embossed where the codes should be, rigs it into a recursive loop, and by mid-afternoon eight people stand watching in a room that "smelled very bad indeed" (6). The same anonymous mailer has already emptied a Berkeley household seventeen responders deep and two-thirds of a Tempe film festival; the warehoused survivors are "Docile and continent but blank [...] pithed"; Tine's staff give the thing its intelligence name, trace the mailings to routing hubs pointing north, and quietly log the first family clue — the victim's "prior possible involvement with the widow of the auteur" (7). What nobody can say is why it works: holography-density, the Brandon p-terminal "Rivers of Reward" precedent — analogies, not findings; the one hard datum is the victims' eyes, "Empty of intent," or in Steeply's grimmer revision "stuck" (8). Even studying it costs bodies on both sides — an idiot intern, then the twenty-year man who went in to pull him out (11) — and the only rumored mercy, a counter-film antidote, exists as "craziness of rumors" that the performer calls a dry joke of Jim's (9).

The geopolitics turn on a copyright engineer's spec sheet. Everyone has Read-Only copies; nobody has the Master; and only a Master can be duplicated (10, 14). Marathe states the A.F.R. thesis with terrible economy: the cartridge is "a U.S.A. production [...] Made by an American man in the U.S.A.," and the weapon is not the film but the choice — offer it to a nation that would be "fed this death of pleasure with spoons" and let the appetite do the rest (10). So the hunt runs down the object's physical trail: the copy Gately's botched Brookline burglary shook loose from DuPlessis (12), the pawned café-au-lait maker, the fatal interviews, the Antitois' shelf — where the real Entertainment finally surfaces, smile-embossed, at the cost of Desjardins and the diabetic Joubet, and proves Read-Only (14). The same search samples the wheelchaired-ecstatic street displays that had seeped into Boylston's scenery (13) and finds them blank — F.L.Q. terror-theater, "probably the hoax." And the cell converts its one working copy into an instrument, pricing re-viewings at a self-sawed digit apiece to prove the desire "incapable of satiation" (15): the ninth finger comes off as willingly as the second.

With the direct route dead, the two hunts become mirror images of each other. The A.F.R. pivots to persons (16): the radio engineer snatched and drained, the halfway houses of greater Boston canvassed for a veiled face, Luria P—— hung on the athlete son that U.S.O.U.S.'s own operative has been "clinging to [...] like a bad odor" — until, every canvass reported back negative (and Marathe privately knowing better), Fortier authorizes the most drastic step: acquire the auteur's immediate family, a mirror across I-91 at the former St. Johnsbury, "An old F.L.Q. trick," to swallow a busload of tennis children whole (17). The U.S. answer, that same snowed-in week, is a crossed-eyed prancing burro teaching four-to-twelve-year-olds to accept no smiling-faced cartridge and to fetch a policeman who can cut the power if the parents go glassy (18) — the superpower reduced to warning its children, in a cartoon, about its own national art form.

The endgame is the maker's last joke, delivered by the performer. Steeply finally reaches Joelle, who gives him the two scenes, the lens, and the punchline both hunts have been converging on: the Masters, if they exist, went into the coffin, and "Where he's buried is itself buried, now. It's in your annulation-zone. It's not even your territory." (19) — the grave lies in the widow's home province, annexed into the Great Concavity by the same Reconfiguration that created the A.F.R. Under a huge inverted tumbler an amplified voice is meanwhile demanding of Orin "Where Is The Master Buried" (19; the AFR thread (17)), and the spine stops there, mid-demand, exactly where the A.F.R. and E.T.A. timelines stop — no grave dug, no Master shown, no gala reached. Whether a finished Master exists, what makes the thing lethal, whether the antidote was ever more than a joke: all three stay open, as printed, while the object itself goes on smiling its crude ballpoint smile from inside ground that two nations buried and now cannot reach — a cage or really a door, still undecided (3).