'You could always point out to the profiler that there's a nice little irony to Gentle's strategy ending up bringing Canada together at our expense, when it was pretty obviously meant to bring us together at Canada's expense.'

'But you sound like you think the more deeply pondered response would be something else.'

'All I know is some very basic schoolboy history from Poutrincourt's cla.s.s. And from the advantage of occasional contact with the Moms.'

'Hit me.'

'The historical record indicates pretty clearly that the one and only nationalism in the Quebecois soul is Quebecois nationalism. It's been "Nous v. La Plupart Toujours," and the more so the farther out on the fringes you get. I can't see the Separatisteurs considering Quebec a true part of Canada any more than Lesotho saw itself as part of SOUTHAF. Poutrincourt keeps thumping the fact that there's no valid comparison between Quebec and our own antebellum South. Why do you think Meech Lake III h h failed? It's because at root they've never seen themselves as anything other than hostages of Ottawa and the Anglophone provinces. Even moderate Separatisteurs like Parizeau spoke of the final surrender on the Plains of Abraham as a kind of forced property-transfer, the whole original war failed? It's because at root they've never seen themselves as anything other than hostages of Ottawa and the Anglophone provinces. Even moderate Separatisteurs like Parizeau spoke of the final surrender on the Plains of Abraham as a kind of forced property-transfer, the whole original war i i as one in which French-Canadians weren't the losers so much as the spoils. Booty.' as one in which French-Canadians weren't the losers so much as the spoils. Booty.'

'This all checks with the Subject's take.'

'The impression I get is that Quebec's hatred of anglophone Canada transcends anything they could work up against O.N.A.N. Just mention 1759 and the Moms's lips disappear. Pemulis and Axford keep coming early and putting a big gothic 1759 1759 on the blackboard before G&M on the blackboard before G&M j j just to watch the Moms's lips disappear when she comes in and sees it.' just to watch the Moms's lips disappear when she comes in and sees it.'

'My sense is the Subject concurs on the hatred-a.s.sessment. They want plain out, always have. Health-care and NAFTA be d.a.m.ned. That's why they sabotaged all three Meech Lake Accords, she says. She seems to imply the anti-O.N.A.N. thing is some sort of anomalous dodge or something.'

'I've got to confess a sort of curiosity now about this profiler you just last week were preparing to fend off about Himself. Not to mention comparing her to defensive linemen. Rubensian was never your type, I didn't think.'

'Plus any Subject you're bothering about even giving the impression of depth to. This is more work than your type of Subject tends to demand, usually, isn't it?'

'This is something else that isn't you. You've never exactly been shy about discussing Subjects with me.'

'It's complex. She's grown on me.'

'It's this certain way way she takes notes on your explanation of Coffin-Corner punts.' she takes notes on your explanation of Coffin-Corner punts.'

'It's complicated. There's a lot I'm not saying. She's got levels. I've discovered levels and dimensions to her I didn't know were originally there.'

'Oh O., please please don't let it just be you've just discovered she's married with little kids. That's not it by any chance is it? Please let it be something other than little kids.' don't let it just be you've just discovered she's married with little kids. That's not it by any chance is it? Please let it be something other than little kids.'

'Let it be something other than the hordes of other Subjects I've sat and listened to excruciatingly detailed s.a.d.i.s.tic blow-by-blow Strategic accounts of. Orin "Home-wrecker" Incandenza, this is what the team calls you, in like jest? You sick pup.'

'I'm a sick pup? a sick pup? I'm I'm the sick one?' the sick one?'

'... Wants to blame her, won't admit it, needs to, won't admit it, sweepingly blames the whole affair of Himself on her, won't interface with her or worse even acknowledge her, resents even the fact she forgives things like you and Marlon Bain killing her dog -'

'- a hit-and-run-and-back-up-and-hit-again driver, I told told you rep-' you rep-'

'- pretends he gets the most r.e.t.a.r.date PR staffer he can make hold the crayon to send grotesque solecistic pseudo-impersonal replies to her pathetic letters. Jethro Bodine, O.? Jethro Bodine? Bodine?'

'A private chuckle. She'd never get it.'

'Disowns her - worse, sicker, tells himself he's convinced himself she doesn't even exist, as if she never existed, but by some coincidence has this rapacious fetish for young married mothers he can strategize into betraying their spouses and maybe damaging their kids for all time, and has this apparently even more rapacious compulsive need to call the blood-relative he hasn't even seen in four years and tell him all about every Subject and Strategy, blow-by-blow, long distance, in nanomicroscopic detail. Let's stop and ponder this this all for a moment, O., what say?' all for a moment, O., what say?'

'I'm letting all this be just water off a duck's back. I can tell it's the tooth talking. I can remember the stress of the place. All I can say is that trust me here: this Moment Moment Subject is like strickenly dissimilar from what you're indicting. The levels and circ.u.mstances aren't the ones you're so anxious to call rapacious. Is all I can say at this juncture.' Subject is like strickenly dissimilar from what you're indicting. The levels and circ.u.mstances aren't the ones you're so anxious to call rapacious. Is all I can say at this juncture.'

'Why do I suspect it's simply that you tried to make the big X with her and she demurred and this simply piqued your interest? During my can't-miss nail-interval you were saying how enormous interior linemen were making comments about her bottom being so huge and soft you could whack it over and over with a car antenna and not hurt it.'

'Hallie I never said any such f.u.c.king thing. You pulled that out of the air. And I'm I'm sick?' sick?'

'You said she was obese.'

'I said she was a girl and a half in all directions. Which all of a sudden there was something that seemed cross-cultural about it: I had this sudden flash of understanding how cultures can regard largeness as erotic. More of someone to love. Not to mention queerly and oddly intense and alive and vibrant.'

'And she declined a casual advance, and showed you pictures of her like enormous offspring, and you came to attention.'

'With a heartbreakingly lovely face, too, Hal, all peachy and lissome, like big pretty girls get.'

'I'm going to have to keep her away from this kid Ortho Stice up here, because he really is a Rubensophile. After P.M.s when we sit around he'll go on and on about enormous b.r.e.a.s.t.s and melon bellies and quivering laps until we're all grimacing and pinching our nose-bridges. And whatever you meant was not lissome lissome.'

'The reserve QB who's next to me in these G.o.dawful pre-game costumed swoop-and-glides said something I liked. Helen pa.s.sed him in the locker room and he - do you want to hear this?'

'She was in the locker room?'

'It's the law. The pros aren't a PR-gulag. He said she had a face that'd break your heart and then also break the heart of whoever like rushed over to your aid as you pitched over sideways grabbing your chest.'

'That is a pretty good one, O.'

'But so far we concur on the basic oddness, it sounds like. If the radicals want Quebec loose from Canada still, and that's always been the priceless pearl, why like dissipate themselves trying to wreak mayhem down here almost the precise moment Interdependence is declared? 'ce pas?'

'I'd rather just agree it's a stumper and then go dry my ankle and find a clean shirt and grab Schacht and hit him up for some Anbesol before we hit the truck.'

'Right? And do these different groups get along, amongst themselves, the different Separatist f.l.a.n.g.es?'

'Not according to Poutrincourt they don't.'

'So why then the united concerted switch from like Let Quebec Go or we stick knives in the eyes of Canadian VIPs and drop huge confections on Rue Sherbrooke during St. Jean-Baptiste Day to all of a sudden Let Canada Go or we blow up ATHSCME towers and stretch mirrors across U.S. highways and hang fleur-de-lis banners from U.S. monuments and disrupt InterLace pulses and skywrite Nuck obscenities over Buffalo and d.i.c.ky with waste-vehicle launchers so it rains moose-guano on New Haven and shoot O.N.A.N.ite V.I.P.s on U.S. soil and only barely get foiled from injecting anaerobic toxins into jars of Planters peanuts?'

'The New Haven Brown Rain thing was sort of a chortle, though, you have to admit.'

'Chortles are good. We like chortles. But what's the political motivation for the about-face? Account for this for me. All it has to do is sound soberly considered.'

'Orin, I'm trying to reconcile your doubtless sincere seriousness about this with your choice of me as co-ponderer.'

'All -'

'I'm a privileged white seventeen-year-old U.S. male. I'm a student at a tennis academy that sees itself as a prophylactic. I eat, sleep, evacuate, highlight things with yellow markers, and hit b.a.l.l.s. I lift things and swing things and run in huge outdoor circles. I am just about as apolitical as someone can be. I am out of all loops but one, by design. I'm sitting here naked with my foot in a bucket. What exactly is it you hope to get from me on this? I keep losing focus on whether you want a deep-sounding line of patter to facilitate Xing this fleshy Subject or have somehow been seduced into believing it's really worth pondering the weedy thought-processes of fringe Canadians. Of fringe anybody anybody. How consistent do the Brazilian Nuevo Contras Nuevo Contras' objectives look? The Noie Storkraft Noie Storkraft's? Shining Path's? The Belgian CCC's'? Pro-Life a.s.sault squads? The Ez-ed-Dean-el-Qa.s.san? Ez-ed-Dean-el-Qa.s.san? P.E.T.A. fur-farm arsonists' objectives? Jesus, Gentle and the poor C.U.S.P.s?' P.E.T.A. fur-farm arsonists' objectives? Jesus, Gentle and the poor C.U.S.P.s?' k k 'Poor C.U.S.P.s?' 'Why not just soberly shrug and invoke the term C.U.S.P.s?' 'Why not just soberly shrug and invoke the term wacko wacko and leave it at that? Why not tell her you're a radically simple and somewhat sick young man who kicks b.a.l.l.s really high in the air for a living?' and leave it at that? Why not tell her you're a radically simple and somewhat sick young man who kicks b.a.l.l.s really high in the air for a living?'

'All I -'

'Why not just say who cares? who cares? This stuff isn't about you and me. The person this stuff is about is the person you say you've erased from all RAM. Why not tell the d.a.m.n truth for once?' This stuff isn't about you and me. The person this stuff is about is the person you say you've erased from all RAM. Why not tell the d.a.m.n truth for once?'

'Me tell the truth? tell the truth? Me Me lie?' lie?'

'What, this ascapartic bathroom-mag journalist is going to give you like an SAT entrance-test on Francophone extremism? Like a gyno-entrance exam? You have to place above a certain percentile to get her to let you X her on the floor of the nursery right next to the ba.s.sinet? Whom are you trying to kid? Whom do you think this is really about? Can you be that sick that you can't even admit it over the f.u.c.king phone? phone?'

'Or what?'

'I'm sorry, O. I apologize.'

'Think nothing of it. I know you didn't mean it.'

'I hate losing the temper.'

'You don't sound good, Hallie. You sound ground down.'

Hal grinds at his eye with a finger. 'These tooth-episodes make me feel like that wobbled shrieking figure in that Munch lithograph.'

'That chew's going to eat right through your membranes. It's a vicious vice. I'm urging in all earnest. Ask that Schacht kid.'

Michael Pemulis cracks Hal's door slowly and slowly pokes his head and one shoulder in, saying nothing. He has showered but is still flushed, and his right eye gets wobbly in this certain way when two or three Tenuates are wearing off. He has his yachting cap, gold epaulets of fake naval braid, and in one ear a piratical gold hoop that lights up in sync with his pulse. With the door just cracked and his head poked in he brings his other arm in over from behind like it's not his arm, his hand in the shape of a claw just over his head, and makes as if the claw from behind is pulling him back out into the hall. W/ an eye-rolling look of fake terror.

Hal is hunched, examining his finger for eye-material. 'In all the excitement we've neglected the most obvious response, then, O. Your answer for the exam, and then I can go dry the ankle.' He can hear Pemulis asking Petropolis Kahn and Stephan Wagenknecht something off down the hall through the cracked door.

'I think I already tried the obvious response on her, but hit me.'

'Pemulis just made his first pa.s.s and left the door ajar. I'm sitting here nude in a draft through an open door neglecting the maybe deceptively obvious fact that something like, what, three-quarters of the Concavity's northern border runs contiguous to Quebec.'

'Exactamundo.'

'So that so what if Ottawa didn't formally subjoin the Concavity to any particular province. Really big favor, I'm sure. Because the map speaks for itself. Bits of western New Brunswick and a smidgeon of Ontario aside, the Concavity - the physical fact and fallout of the Concavity - it's Quebec's problem. Something like 750 clicks of border along the Concavity, with attendant seepage, for Notre Rai Pays.'

'Yes plus the brunt of the airborne wastes from the high-alt.i.tude ATHSCMEs, plus being the province that gets splatted when the E.W.D. vehicles overshoot the Concavity. This is what I tried right off the bat on her.'

'So what's the puzzle. Put yourself in Quebec's shoes. Once again they get the gooey end of the Canadian dipstick. It's mostly now western Quebecer kids the size of Volkswagens shlumpfing around with no skulls. It's Quebecers with cloracne and tremors and olfactory hallucinations and infants born with just one eye in the middle of their forehead. It's eastern Quebec that gets green sunsets and indigo rivers and grotesquely asymmetrical snow-crystals and front lawns they have to beat back with a machete to get to their driveways. They get the feral-hamster incursions and the Infant-depredations and the corrosive fogs.'

'Although people aren't exactly flocking to New Brunswick or Lake Ontario either. And the coastal ATHSCMEs send the coastal phenols out over Fundy, and supposedly the lobsters out there are like monsters in old j.a.panese films, and supposedly Nova Scotia glows, at night, in satellite photos.'

'Still and all, O., tell her proportionally speaking it's Quebec that's borne the brunt of what Canada had to take. The brunt again, again, to their way of thinking, remember. Small wonder the fringe mentalities are violently anti-O.N.A.N. up there. There's got to be a real straw-and-camel feel to the whole thing.' to their way of thinking, remember. Small wonder the fringe mentalities are violently anti-O.N.A.N. up there. There's got to be a real straw-and-camel feel to the whole thing.'

The door swings all the way open and clunks against the wall behind it. Michael Pemulis has pretended to kick it in. 'Good Lard preserve us he's nekkid,' he says, coming in and closing the door to check behind it. Hal holds up a hand for him to wait a second.

'Except here's the thing,' Orin says. Pemulis stands expectantly in an uncluttered patch of Hal's half of the floor and makes a show of looking at his wrist as if there were a watch there. Hal nods at him and holds up one finger.

'Except here's the thing,' Orin is saying. 'The issue she raises is is there really any sort of realistic hope of Quebec getting Gentle to get O.N.A.N. to reverse the Reconfiguration. Take back the Concavity, shut down the fans, make us acknowledge the waste as fundamentally American waste.'

'Well probably of course not.' Hal looks up at Pemulis and makes his own hand into a claw and makes clawing motions at the phone. Pemulis is compulsively going around zipping and unzipping everything in the room with a zipper, a habit of his Hal loathes. 'But now she's got you falling back into demanding realistic and consistent logic from fringe mentalities again.'

'But Hallie just hang on. Canada as a whole couldn't oppose O.N.A.N. Wouldn't. Ottawa's so far in now they wouldn't say s.h.i.t if they had three times the mouthful they already have. Of s.h.i.t I mean.'

Pemulis is pointing vehemently out the west window at the parking lot where the tow truck is parked and making exaggerated Henry VIIIlike rending and chewing motions. His eyes, under the waning influence of P.M. stimulants, do not get mirthful or glazed. They just get tiny and lightless and even closer together in his narrow face, like a second set of nostrils. The right eye's little wobble is out of sync with the pulse of his earring.

There's the sound of Orin switching phone-hands. 'So then I'll ask you what she seemed like she rhetorically asked: are the Separatists' and fringe cells' pathetic little anti-O.N.A.N. campaigns and gestures down here basically just hopeless and pathetic?'

'Does fish-s.h.i.t drift slowly bottomward, O.? How could she see it as anything but, if she's as savvy as you say?' Hal removes his pruned white foot from the janitor-bucket and dries it on a woppsed-up sheet. He points at a pair of underwear near Pemulis's Docksider. Pemulis picks the briefs up off the floor with two fingers and tosses them to Hal with a pretend-shudder.

'So simply largely symbolic at best, then?'

Hal's lying back trying to get his legs into the briefs with one hand. 'Tell her after much chin-stroking simply yes, yes, O. O., Pemulis is standing here already in his hat pretending to clang a dinner bell. He's got big glittery ropes of drool swinging from his lower lip.' Pemulis is actually making a complex system of motions indicating both the procedures for rolling a duBois and the lateness of the hour. For the past two years, Hal and Pemulis and Struck and Troeltsch and sometimes B. Boone have made a little ritual of nipping out to the little hidden clearing behind West House's parking lot's dumpsters and sharing an obscene cigar-sized duBois before the I.-Day-Eve expedition and supper out, while Schacht and sometimes Ortho Stice sit inside the tow truck, faces green in the green glow of the truck's instruments, warming it up. Hal sits up and makes a waggling go-on-ahead-on-down motion to Pemulis. O. O., Pemulis is standing here already in his hat pretending to clang a dinner bell. He's got big glittery ropes of drool swinging from his lower lip.' Pemulis is actually making a complex system of motions indicating both the procedures for rolling a duBois and the lateness of the hour. For the past two years, Hal and Pemulis and Struck and Troeltsch and sometimes B. Boone have made a little ritual of nipping out to the little hidden clearing behind West House's parking lot's dumpsters and sharing an obscene cigar-sized duBois before the I.-Day-Eve expedition and supper out, while Schacht and sometimes Ortho Stice sit inside the tow truck, faces green in the green glow of the truck's instruments, warming it up. Hal sits up and makes a waggling go-on-ahead-on-down motion to Pemulis.

'But you have the... Mr. Hope, Hope,' Pemulis stage-whispers.

'One moment please.' Hal clamps a hand hard over the phone and covers phone and hand with two pillows and some bedding, and stage-whispers 'Where's your part of the Mr. H. all of a sudden? Why do we have to roll a zeppelin out of my my part of the Hope I bought retail from part of the Hope I bought retail from you you not three days ago?' not three days ago?'

The nystagmus makes the eye-rolling lurider. 'Extenuations. We can get it all sorted out right later. n.o.body's going to like exploit exploit you.' you.'

And then it's hard to extract the hand and phone. 'O., I'm going to have to book out of here in just about one second.'

'Just how about this. Ponder this in advance for me and try and stay upright til you can call me back. This was the Subject's crux-type proposal. You can call collect if you want.'

'I don't have to respond,' Hal says.

'Correct.'

'I just listen and then break the connection.'

'Calling me like tonight or tomorrow before lunch, collect if I.-Day's full-toll.'

'I just sit here very briefly and then the conversation's over and we can go.' Hal's directing all this more at Pemulis, who's pacing and holding the Constantine bust in his hands and examining it at close range, shaking his head.

'All set? This is it. Are you set?'

'So go already.'

'Her poser goes roughly like this. If the Separatists' big object has always been to independently secede, and if they've got about a s...o...b..ll's chance of ever really getting O.N.A.N. de-Reconfigured, and if pretty much all Canadians despise Gentle and the transfer of the Concavity and the whole Experialist merde sandwich, but especially the Concavity, the cartographic fact of a Concavity in our map and a new Convexity in theirs, that the maps now say it's Canadian soil, this toxified like area: grant that all this is obviously right; then why don't the Separatists in Quebec use the fact of the odiousness of the Concavity to go put their parliamentary wigs on and go to Ottawa to parliament and say to the rest of Canada like: Look, let us secede, and we'll take the Concavity with with us when we secede, it'll be our problem not yours, it'll go on the maps as Quebecois and not Canadian, it'll be us when we secede, it'll be our problem not yours, it'll go on the maps as Quebecois and not Canadian, it'll be our our blot and blot and our our bone of dissension with O.N.A.N., and Canadian honor will be desmirched, and Canada's pathetic standing in O.N.A.N. and the like world community of standings will be rehabilitated because of the ingenious way Ottawa's parliament will have re-gerrymandered O.N.A.N.'s map without taking on the U.S. directly? Why not this? Why don't they go to Ottawa and say Cuibono all around and say This way everybody wins? We get our own Notre Rai Pays, and you get the slap in the face of the Concavity off your map. The Subject posited why the Nucks don't see the odiousness of the Concavity as maybe the best thing that ever happened to them in terms of Canada's persuadability into letting Quebec go. She hit me with Why wouldn't your thinking militant Nucks use the Concavity as a bargaining chip for independence, why would they want O.N.A.N. to take back the one thing odious enough to be a chip?' bone of dissension with O.N.A.N., and Canadian honor will be desmirched, and Canada's pathetic standing in O.N.A.N. and the like world community of standings will be rehabilitated because of the ingenious way Ottawa's parliament will have re-gerrymandered O.N.A.N.'s map without taking on the U.S. directly? Why not this? Why don't they go to Ottawa and say Cuibono all around and say This way everybody wins? We get our own Notre Rai Pays, and you get the slap in the face of the Concavity off your map. The Subject posited why the Nucks don't see the odiousness of the Concavity as maybe the best thing that ever happened to them in terms of Canada's persuadability into letting Quebec go. She hit me with Why wouldn't your thinking militant Nucks use the Concavity as a bargaining chip for independence, why would they want O.N.A.N. to take back the one thing odious enough to be a chip?'

'Who's this you're talking to you can't call back?' Pemulis says loudly, pacing back and forth with little toy-soldier about-faces, his hoop flickering like mad.

Hal lowers the phone but doesn't cover it. 'It's Orin, wanting to know why Quebec and the F.L.Q. and so on haven't tried bargaining with the Canadian administration, offering Quebec's cartographic adoption of the Concavity in exchange for Separation.' Hal c.o.c.ks his head slightly. 'This could be Poutrincourt's so-called Separation and return's real meaning, it occurs to me.'

'Orin as in your brother, with the leg?'

'He's all in a swivet about inter-O.N.A.N.ite politics.'

Pemulis makes a megaphone of his hands. 'Tell him who gives a bright flaming fart! Tell him to go read a book! Tell him to access any one of a dozen D-bases off of the Net! Tell him you're pretty sure he can afford it!' Pemulis's hands are slender and red-knuckled and his fingers long and sort of falcate. 'Tell him you can hear the truck getting impatiently revved as on one of the very few totally free nights we ever get our friends get ready to leave without you. Remind him how we have to eat on schedule up here or we get the wobbles. Tell him we read books and tirelessly access D-bases and run our a.s.ses off all day here and need to eat instead of we don't just stand there and swing one leg up and down over and over for seven-plus figures.'

'Tell p.e.n.i.sless to go sit on something sharp,' Orin says.

'O., he's right, I can feel that feeling of my body starting to feed on itself. You said I could think and call you back. I'll use your pager if you like.'