‘So your multilevelled journalist’s hypothesizing a kind of meta-extortion.’ Hal can hear Pemulis’s whistle-lipped breathing. ‘Separation is still the Québecer insurgents’ real goal, and their anti-O.N.A.N. insurgency is not what it appears.’ Hal’s in the dark under the desk that the fold-out TP and drives and phone console and modem are stacked on one corner of, surrounded by nests of wires, trying to find his other street-shoe. ‘It’s supposedly just been a ruse to arouse O.N.A.N.’s ire at Canada so the Québecers can use the U.S. and Mexico as levers on Ottawa.’
‘Trying to engineer it so that Canada’ll be more than happy to disassociate from them,’
Orin says. ‘And Fm saying I don’t have the background or lobes to even know whether she might be putting me on, testing my depth.’
‘You’ve always had a special dread of depth-testing.’
‘How about why don’t you just toss me the Bob and Axhandle and me’ll go down and get things ready and wait for you,’ Pemulis stage-whispers to Hal’s slacks’ bottom, which is pretty much all that’s visible from under the desk. Hal’s hand comes up out of the leg-space under the desk and raises one finger and shakes it a little for emphasis. Pemulis is standing next to the small TP viewer — which is propped up like a large photo with a buttressy thing that folds out of its back — and the TP’s disk- and cartridge-drive, which takes up less than a quarter of the desktop and has the phone’s console and power unit bolted into a receptacle on the drive’s side.
Hal’s voice is muffled and has the strained pitch of someone trying to clear nests of dust-bunnied wire to find something. ‘Except Orin I don’t see a great deal of pondering required here. The total anti-U.S. insurgency so far’s been too hapless and small-potato for her theory to work. The odd pie- and guano-bombardment, stretching mirrors across lonely roads, even demapping officials and botulizing the occasional peanut jar. None of this is exactly bringing anyone to his knees. None of this is making Canada or Quebec look like any kind of serious threat.’
Michael Pemulis, his jaunty cap pushed back and his lips pursed as if whistling, but not whistling, is very casually brushing his hand over the drive and console’s power unit, as if killing time by casually dusting. His other hand’s jingling pocket-change. There’s the sound of Hal clunking his head on something under the desk. His bottom is bony and his belt has missed two loops. The power unit’s toggle’s next to a little red jewel of a power-light that blinks at the same rate as a smoke alarm when the toggle’s on ON.
Hal sneezes twice. Pemulis taps his fingers in a little anapestic gallop over the unit’s top. Orin sounds like he’s sitting up straight. ‘Hallie kid now you’re right with me, this is where your pondering lobes come in, because that was just my response, that there was nothing sufficiently more than just an annoying gnat-like annoyance about the insurgencies, which is where she moved beyond my depth back into l(a), if you remember, when she raised this samizdat-word in connec—’
a. Don’t ask.
b. Ibid.
c. I.e., the Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts, a syntactic-integrity PAC Avril had put together with two or three very dear friends and colleagues around metro Boston.
d. The Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster’s anti-sclerotic miracle-food craze.
e. The then-skinny Eliot Kornspan, before Loach and Freer got hold of him.
f. At once high-tech and somehow atavistic, Telegrocery services let you order off your TP and then have the stuff brought right to your door by college-studenty types, often within hours, saving one the stress and fluorescent hassle of public food-shopping. As of Y.D.A.U. it’s still very big in some areas and not all that big in others. The first Tele-grocery service didn’t even launch in metro Boston until YY2007MRCVMETIUFI/ ITPSFH,O,OM(s), and it’s still mostly in Boston a downscale and blue-collar thing, oddly.
g. Interlace serves just about all of habitable O.N.A.N.; each nation comprises (roughly speaking) an entertainment-dissemination ‘Grid.’
h. After Meech Lake I, Charlottetown I and II, and Meech Lake II, this was Ottawa’s fifth and final attempt to placate Quebec with a constitutional amendment formalizing the Gallic province’s right to ‘preserve and promote’ a ‘distinct society and culture.’
i. The French and Indian War, known to Québecers as ‘La Guerre des Britanniques et des Sauvages,’ BS c. 1754-60, at the final battles of which, at the Plains of Abraham in ‘59 and Montreal in ‘60, the English and Americans kicked ass and took names in a large way that’s never quite been forgotten by the Québecois, whose memory for insult is the stuff of legend. The wily Amherst was there, too, at Ticonderoga and Montreal, with his trusty smallpox-blankets.
j. Grammar and Meaning.
k. The Clean U.S. Party of Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner.
1. The Calgarian pro-Canadian Phalanx.
[111] Hal’s term, actually an Incandenza-family term, actually not inappropriate here because like most Incandenza-family terms put into family usage by Avril, who’s an expatriate Québecer, whinge is some east-Canadian idiom for vigorous high-pitched complaining, almost like whining except with a semantic tinge of legitimacy to the complaint.
[112] The soon to be all-too-well-known and dread-inspiring Assassins des Fauteuils Roll-ents of the E.W.D.-receptacle-festooned Papineau region of southwestern Quebec.
[113] Which sinewy stuff is described by the OB-GYN specialist in his DictaChart as ‘neural-gray.’
[114] © B.S. MCMLXII, The Glad Flaccid Receptacle Corporation, Zanesville OH, sponsor of the very last year of O.N.A.N.ite Subsidized Time (q.v. Note 78). All Rights Reserved.
[115] Volkmann’s contracture’s some kind of severe serpentine deformation of the arms following a fracture that hadn’t been set right or splinted or where the arm’s been allowed to stay all woundedly bent in as it heals; bradyauxesis refers to some part(s) of the body not growing as fast as the other parts of the body — Himself and the Moms got plenty familiar with these sorts of congenital-challenge terms and many more, re Mario, particularly the variations on the medical root brady, from the Greek bradys meaning slow, such as bradylexia (w/r/t reading), bradyphenia (practical-problem-solving-type thinking), nocturnal bradypnea (dangerously slow breathing during sleep sometimes, which is why Mario uses four pillows minimum), bradypedestrianism (obvious), and especially bradykinesia, an almost gerontologic lentissimo about most of Mario’s movements, an exaggerated slowness that both resembles and permits extremely close slow attention to whatever’s being done.
[116] Pretty much the BMW of 16mm. digital-cartridge recorders, brought out in limited numbers by Paillard Cinématique of Sherbrooke, Quebec, CAN, just weeks before its manufacturing facilities were annularly hyperfloriated and the company went belly-up.
[117]. overshot the place to mention that Mario’s head — in perverse contradistinction to the arm-trouble — is hyperauxetic, and two to three times the size of your more average elf-to-jockey-sized head and facies.