The "Survey" ruse: casing Orin at the hotel door (identity by inference)

pivotal · 7 Nov YDAU

• When: 7 November YDAU — a bland card-key hotel in the Southwest, minutes after Orin has bedded the married Swiss "hand-model"
• What: A legless, bushy-haired man in a shiny wheelchair — string tie, lap blanket, clipboard held "with a curled and motherly arm," a freckled bald spot Orin finds almost unbearably touching — appears at Orin Incandenza's hotel door announcing only "Survey," and administers a meandering pseudo-questionnaire ("What do you miss, please?") that draws Orin into an unguarded aria of nostalgia for broadcast television. It is a casing operation: the man's eyes are wrong for the part, and he pointedly flicks a glance past Orin at the humped bedding where the Subject lies hidden — "the non-Swiss woman," calm on her side with an O2-mask and a hand on a Schmeisser machine pistol in her purse. No autograph-ruse ever comes; the man notes Orin as, "comme on dit, engaged" and offers to "return at later time which we specify." The body text never names him and never says A.F.R.; the raw's gist and the forward chain to 184 (the same shy handicapped "fan" with the Subject's Swiss accent, there called the A.F.R. leader) identify him as Fortier — inference, and the recon that seeds event 7.