Breaking Molly Notkin: the technical interviewer who keeps the light on

pivotal · ? Nov YDAU

• When: ? Nov YDAU, in Molly Notkin's darkened, lock-dickied co-op living room, just after her arrival by high-speed rail from N.N.Y.C.
• What: Jr's one plot-consequential act. Under the Chief's technical-interview protocol — "Technical interviewers under Chief of Unspecified Services R. ('the G.') Tine really do do this, bring a portable high-watt lamp" and shine it on the subject's face, "homburg and shade-affording eyebrows … removed by polite but emphatic request" — it is the light, "more than any kind of tough noir-informed grilling from R. Tine Jr. and the other technical interviewer," that prompts M.I.T. A.B.D.-Ph.D. Molly Notkin to "spill her guts, roll over, eat cheese, sing like a canary, tell everything she believed she knew": the entire hidden history of the Auteur's lethal cartridge, Madame Psychosis (Joelle), her disfigurement, and "the little rotter" Orin — the Unspecified-Services thread reaching straight into the Incandenza world. Jr's named contribution is refusal: when Notkin claims she'd be far more forthcoming if they'd switch the beastly lamp off, the plea "is a brass-faced falsehood and dismissed as such by R. Tine Jr., and so the light stays right on Molly Notkin’s glabrous unhappy face." Mid-scene, one of the standing figures keeps "tapping something irritatingly against the lamp's conic metal shade" — unnamed in the scene, though the tic invites a guess (see Dating notes). The Chief himself is the interviewers' authority, not present as the interviewer.