The DMZ lobbying and the addiction sermon

texture · 11-12 Nov YDAU

• When: 11-12 Nov YDAU (the calculus tutorial in Rm. 204, and the corridor talk)
• What: Threaded through a calculus tutorial for Hal's Boards, Pemulis lobbies Hal to go through with the DMZ drop before Tucson, glossing Hal's "DMZ-dream" (Hal as the Leavenworth soldier, screaming for help while everyone hears Ethel Merman) as "a standard nobody-understands-me dream." He supplies the pharmacology that makes DMZ plannable: "Have I mentioned DMZ doesn't show up on a G.C./M.S.?… It's the fitviavi-mold base"; Struck traced its "original intent" to inducing "transcendent experiences in… chronic alcoholics in the like 1960s at Verdun Protestant Hospital in Montreal." When Hal floats quitting everything "forever," Pemulis delivers his counter-doctrine — that you cannot simply quit what you need; "if you're addicted you need it… and if you need it what do you imagine happens if you just hoist the white flag… You lose your mind, Inc. You die inside." He frames DMZ not as escalation but as a "switch." Meanwhile he does the due-diligence Hal required (event 13): "Pemulis's only concern is is this DMZ he got for the WhataBurger detectable. He goes to the library and pores" (scene 157), and with Struck he "blarneyed their way past the library-attendant at the B.U. School of Pharmacy" to research it (scene 126). [Pemulis is actively trying to get DMZ into Hal in these days — a fact the "was Hal dosed?" question must weigh; the timeline records the lobbying and resolves nothing about outcome.]