The desert outcropping: the sixth-or-seventh night-long interface with Marathe

pivotal · 30 April – 1 May YDAU

• When: the night of 30 April into the dawn of 1 May YDAU, on an outcropping northwest of Tucson AZ (per the archive's dating ruling: every installment of the mountainside serial is this one night)
• What: Steeply slides clumsily (in field-drag, skirt riding up, hosiery torn on cactus) down onto the shelf where the blanket-lapped Marathe waits, machine pistol beneath the blanket. They face out over Tucson with "an air of careless intimacy, as of old friends... or a long-married couple," speaking mostly Steeply's preferred English. It is their "sixth or seventh" such meeting; both agencies "looked forward to these meetings"; they "accomplished little." At the frame's dawn end Steeply is still pressing the analogy sideways, trading cross-cultural myths of pleasure fatal to its beholder — the blond-furred woman of the East, Québec's "L'Odalisque de Sainte Thérèse," "A Medusa in reverse" (scene 103; a beat two independent readings both surface, folded here — same scene, same night). This is the frame for events 6–10.