Endgame glimpses: enemy imaginings, defection daydreams, and a cancelled address to the nation

texture · ?/12-17 Nov YDAU

• When: mid-to-late Nov YDAU — Fortier's bus vision (?/12-14 Nov), Marathe's Ennet House calculations (14 Nov), the cancelled address heard on Hal's car radio (17 Nov)
• What: As the samizdat crisis tightens, Gentle appears only in other minds and one radio report. Fortier, imagining the Entertainment loosed on Boston, pictures the endgame as "M. Tine holding the hand holding the pen of President J. Gentle as the O.N.A.N.ite President signs declaring War" — the enemy's own image of the figurehead question (event 4). Fortier also values the leak of his pure-malice agenda for "the hope of instilling even deeper chills of fear in Sans-Christe Gentle and his O.N.A.N. chiens-courants." Marathe, weighing betrayal at Ennet House, daydreams the other fork: Québec seceding "to alone draw down the wrath of chanteur-fou Gentle's anger," and his own "valuable welcome by Gentle" — the President as dispenser of asylum and his wife's medical care. And on 17 Nov, Hal's AM radio carries the administration's last attested public motion: it "had scheduled and then cancelled a special Spontaneous-Disseminated address to the nation on subjects unknown," leaving NPR to roundtable the possibilities. The book's final sight of the Gentle administration is a speech that does not happen, about something never named.