The DMZ acquisition, its chemistry and lore, its storage — the was-Hal-dosed question

pivotal · 4-5 Nov YDAU

• When: 4-5 Nov YDAU (the transaction; the display/planning "over the course of the next academic day," 11/5)
• What: Pemulis "finally landed 650 mg. of the vaunted and elusive compound DMZ or 'Madame Psychosis'" — thirteen 50-mg tablets — "from a small-arms-draped duo of reputed former Canadian insurgents" who front Antitoi Entertainment on Prospect St. up from Inman Square; because Pemulis speaks no French and always works solo, "the whole transaction with the Nuck in charge had to be negotiated in dumbshow." The Canadians "had no idea what what they were in possession of was worth." DMZ (a fitviavi-mold derivative synthesized by the same Sandoz chemist who discovered LSD; effects "temporally-cerebral and almost ontological") has "a popular-lay-chemical-underground reputation as the single grimmest thing ever conceived in a tube"; its street name "Madame Psychosis" derives from the WYYY radio personality (scene 050). Pemulis narrates the CIA/Army lore — a Leavenworth convict "injected with some massive unspecified dose" who "literally lost his mind," singing Ethel Merman show-tunes (scene 057). His epistemic frustration with the drug is its own character note: the literature's accounts of DMZ's temporal effects are, "as far as Pemulis is concerned, vague and inelegant and more like mystical in the Tibetan-Dead-Book vein than rigorous or referentially clear"; the one image whose "neuro-titillating gist" he can at least get is an Italian lithographer's self-portrait on DMZ as Futurist sculpture "plowing at high knottage through time itself, kinetic even in stasis," time "coming off him like water in sprays and wakes" (n57 pp. 0995-0996). STORAGE/ACCESS (surfaced, resolving nothing): the stash is kept two ways — portable, in the yachting cap's detachable lining (event 12); and at rest "wrapped tight in Saran and stashed deep in the toe of an old sneaker that sits atop the aluminum strut between two panels in subdorm B's drop ceiling, Pemulis's time-tested entrepôt" (scene 057) — the same "ultimate entrepôt above the false ceiling in Subdorm B's male hallway" named in n324, which also records his older tradecraft: a locker "practically alphabetized," "factory-concealed niches" in shelving he installed at fifteen, and "small cloth packets of ground cayenne pepper, to foil the always-remotely-possible sniffer-dog." THE PLAN: sample it "in predeterminedly safe amounts," Pemulis + Axford + Hal only, over "a solid 36 hours of demand-free time" — the window fixed at 11/20-21; Hal's condition is a med-library verification that it's organic and nonaddictive. Whether/how any of this DMZ later reaches Hal is left entirely open here (cf. events 21-22). (Cross-ref: the was-Hal-dosed question is weighed at length in this archive's Hal-DMZ adjudication, which finds it undecidable by design; this spine is evidence-record only.)