The technical interview of Orin: her one appearance — "(and who was not really Swiss)"

pivotal · ?/20 Nov YDAU

• When: ?/20 Nov YDAU, Phoenix — Orin wakes inside the giant inverted tumbler; the interview proceeds
• What: Luria's only scene as a named, present character. Orin, drugged and sealed under a huge inverted bathroom tumbler, watches faces through the green glass: "The face at eye-level belonged to the latest Subject, the dexterous and adoring Swiss hand-model," now smoking with crossed arms, meeting his eyes without acknowledgment — beside "the shy and handicapped fan who O.'d realized had shared the Subject's Swiss accent" — the scene-119 two-hander reconvened as interrogators, while an amplified voice demands to know "Where Is The Master Buried." Then the narration finally names her, mid-operation: "Mlle. Luria P———, who disdained the subtler aspects of technical interviews and had lobbied simply to be given a pair of rubber gloves and two or three minutes alone with the Subject's testicles (and who was not really Swiss), had predicted accurately what the Subject's response would be" — the parenthetical "(and who was not really Swiss)" retroactively glossing every scare-quoted 'Swiss' in the Phoenix serial, the rubber-gloves lobbying giving her an appetite the rest of the book never showed, and the accurate prediction confirming how completely the "winning necessary confidences" phase (event 10) mapped her subject. When the sewer roaches pour in and Orin, flattened white against the glass, shrieks "Do it to her! Do it to her!", "Luria P———inclined her head and rolled her eyes at the A.F.R. leader, whom she had long regarded as something of a ham." The eye-roll at Fortier and "long regarded" put her inside the A.F.R.'s inner circle on familiar terms; her rank, like everything else structural about her, is left unstated. NOTE the load-bearing hedges, carried exactly: the scene holds "the Swiss hand-model" and "Luria P———" in adjacent paragraphs without ever writing the equation in one clause — the identification (with "not really Swiss" as its strongest push) remains the text's implication; who "her" is in Orin's shriek is not specified in the scene. Last Luria attestation in the novel; what she extracts from Orin, and everything after, is beyond the book's edge.