The father's death: pacemaker vs. a phone pulse

texture · UNDATED (after Marathe's maiming, B.S. era)

• When: UNDATED (after Marathe already legless; B.S. era, Québec)
• What: Marathe's father died when his Kenbeck pacemaker was damaged by a videophonic pulse — a recorded video-call advertising videophony, from the telephone company. The father picked up the ringing phone (which Rémy "had never been instructed to answer first, to check"), took the pulse, and fell, the ad's audio still playing on the floor beside his ear amid the mother's cries. In the Swiss telling Marathe renders it as a "misdialed number of a cellular phone far away in Trois Rivières." A standing grievance attaches to the device itself: the Québecois pension bureaucracy would fund only "a used Kenbeck pacemaker" (n313 p. 1062) for the father.