Infinite Jest (67 page)

‘It’s snowing on the goddamn
map,
not the
territory,
you
dick!’
Pemulis yells at Penn, whose lower lip is out and quivering. Pemulis’s face is the
face of a man who will someday need blood-pressure medication, a constitution the
Tenuate doesn’t help one bit. Troeltsch is sitting up straight and speaking very intensely
and quietly into his headset. Hal, who in his day never wore the beanie, and usually
portrayed some marginal nation somewhere out in the nuclear boondocks, finds himself
more intrigued by Penn’s map/ territory faux pas than upset by it, or even amused.

Pemulis turns back to the pavilion and seems to be looking at Hal in some kind of
appeal: ‘
Jay
sus!’

‘Except is the territory the real world, quote unquote, though!’ Axford calls across
to Pemulis, who’s pacing like the fence is between him and some sort of prey. Axford
knows quite well Pemulis can be fucked with when he’s like this: when he’s hot he
always cools down and becomes contrite.

Struck tries to yell out a Kertwang on Pemulis but can’t get the megaphone he makes
of his hands to fit over the mouth.

‘The real world’s what the map here
stands
for!’ Lord lifts his head from the Yushityu and cries over at Axhandle, trying to
please Pemulis.

‘Kind of looks like real-world-type snow from here, M.P.,’ Axford calls out. His forehead’s
still maroon from the coughing fit. Troeltsch is trying to describe the distinction
between the symbolic map of the gear-littered courts and the global strategic theater
it stands for using all and only sports-broadcast clichés. Hal looks from Axhandle
to Pemulis to Lord.

Struck finally falls out of his chair with a clunk but his legs are still somehow
entangled in the legs of the chair. It starts to snow harder, and dark stars of melt
begin to multiply and then merge all over the courts. Otis Lord is trying to type
and wipe his nose on his sleeve at the same time. J. Gopnik and K. McKenna are running
around well outside their assigned quadrants with their tongues outstretched.

‘Real-world snow isn’t a factor if it’s falling on the fucking
map!
’

Ann Kittenplan’s crew-cutted head now protrudes from the kind of rugby-scrum AMNAT’s
and SOVWAR’s heads of state form around Lord’s computational food cart. ‘For Christ’s
sake leave us alone!’ she shrieks at Pemulis. Troeltsch is going ‘Oh,
my’
into his headset. O. Lord is struggling with the cart’s protective umbrella, his
head’s beanie’s little white propeller rotating in a rising wind. A light dusting
of snow is starting to appear in the players’ hair.

‘It’s only real-world snow if it’s already in the
scenario!
’ Pemulis keeps directing everything at Penn, who hasn’t said a word since his original
suggestion and is busy sort of casually kicking the Karachi-shirt over into the Arabian
Sea, clearly hoping the original detonation will get forgotten about in all the metatheoretical
fuss. Pemulis rages along the East Courts’ western fence. The combination of several
Tenuate spansules plus Eschaton-adrenaline bring his blue-collar Irish right out.
He’s a muscular but fundamentally physically narrow guy: head, hands, the sharp little
wad of cartilage at the tip of Pemulis’s nose—everything about him seems to Hal to
taper and come to a point, like a bad El Greco. Hal leans to spit and watches him
pace like a caged thing as Lord works feverishly over EndStat’s peace-terms decision-matrix.
Hal wonders, not for the first time, whether he might deep down be a secret snob about
collar-color issues and Pemulis, then whether the fact that he’s capable of wondering
whether he’s a snob attenuates the possibility that he’s really a snob. Though Hal
hasn’t had more than four or five total very small hits off the public duBois, this
is a prime example of what’s sometimes called ‘marijuana thinking.’ You can tell because
Hal’s leaned way over to spit but has gotten lost in a paralytic thought-helix and
hasn’t yet spit, even though he’s right in bombing-position over the NASA glass. It
also occurs to him that he finds the real-snow/unreal-snow snag in the Eschaton extremely
abstract but somehow way more interesting than the Eschaton itself, so far.

IRLIBSYR’s strongman Evan Ingersoll, all of 1.3 m. tall, warmed by baby-fat and high-calorie
cerebral endeavor, has been squatting on his heels like a catcher just west of Damascus,
spinning his Rossignol launcher idly in his hand, watching the one-sided exchange
between Pemulis and Ingersoll’s roommate J. J. Penn, who’s now threatening to quit
and go in for cocoa if they can’t for once play Eschaton without the big guys horning
in again like always. There’s a tiny whirring sound as Ingersoll’s mental gears grind.
From the duration of the little Sierra Leone summit and the studious blankness on
everybody’s face it’s pretty clear that SOVWAR and AMNAT are going to come to terms,
and the terms are likely to involve SOVWAR agreeing not to go SACPOP against AMNAT
in return for AMNAT letting SOVWAR go SACPOP against Ingersoll’s IRLIBSYR, because
if SOVWAR goes SACPOP against an IRLIBSYR that can’t have many warheads left in the
old bucket by now (Ingersoll knows they know) then SOVWAR’ll get to rack up a lot
of INDDIR without much SUFDDIR, while inflicting such SUFDDIR on IRLIBSYR that IRLIBSYR’ll
be effectively eliminated as a threat to AMNAT’s commanding lead in points, which
is what has the most utility in the old game-theoretic matrix right now. The exact
utility transformations are too oogly for an Ingersoll who’s still grappling with
fractions, but he can see clearly that this’d be the most remorselessly logical best-interest-conducive
scenario for both LaMont Chu and especially the Sleepster, Peterson, who’s hated Ingersoll
for months now anyway without any good reason or cause or anything, Ingersoll can
just somehow tell.

Hal, paralyzed and absorbed, watches Ingersoll bob on his haunches and shift his stick
from hand to hand and cerebrate furiously and logically conclude, then, that IRLIBSYR’s
highest possible strategic utility lies in AMNAT and SOVWAR failing to come to terms.

Hal can almost visualize a dark lightbulb going on above Ingersoll’s head. Pemulis
is telling Penn that there’s a critical distinction between horning in and letting
asswipes like Jeffrey Joseph Penn run roughshod over the delimiting boundaries that
are Eschaton’s very life-blood. Chu and Peterson are nodding soberly at little things
they’re saying to each other while Kittenplan cracks her knuckles and Possalthwaite
bounces a warhead idly on his strings.

So now Evan Ingersoll rises from his squat now only to bend again and take a warhead
out of IRLIBSYR’s ordnance-bucket, and Hal seems to be the only one who sees Ingersoll
line up the vector very carefully with his slim thumb and take a lavish backswing
and fire the ball directly at the little circle of super-Combatant leaders in West
Africa. It’s not a lob. It flies straight as if shot from a rifle and strikes Ann
Kittenplan right in the back of the head with a loud
thock.
She whirls to face east, a hand at the back of her bristly skull, scanning and then
locking on Damascus, her face a stony Toltec death-mask.

Pemulis and Penn and Lord and everyone else all freeze, shocked and silent, so there’s
just the weird glittered hiss of falling snow and the sounds of a couple crows interfacing
in the pines over by HmH. The ATHSCME fans are silent, and four sweatsock-shaped clouds
of exhaust hang motionless over the Sunstrand stacks. Nothing moves. No Eschaton Combatant
has ever intentionally struck another Combatant’s physical person with a 5-megaton
thermonuclear weapon. No matter how frayed players’ nerves, it’s never made a lick
of sense. A Combatant’s megatonnage is too precious to waste on personal attacks outside
the map. It’s been like this unspoken but very basic rule.

Ann Kittenplan is so shocked and enraged that she stands there transfixed, quivering,
her sights locked on Ingersoll and his smoking Rossignol. Otis P. Lord feels at his
beanie.

Ingersoll now makes a show of examining the tiny nails of his left hand and casually
suggests that IRLIBSYR has just scored a direct 5-megaton contact-burst against SOVWAR’s
entire launch capacity, namely Air Marshal Ann Kittenplan, and that plus also AMNAT’s
own launch capacity, plus both Combatants’ ordnance and heads of state, all lie well
within the blast’s kill-radius—which by Ingersoll’s rough calculations extends from
the Ivory Coast to the doubles alley’s Senegal. Unless of course that kill-radius
is somehow altered by the possible presence of climatic snow, he adds, beaming.

Pemulis and Kittenplan now each let loose with a linear series of anti-Ingersoll invectives
that drown each other out and make the trees’ crows take slow flight.

But Otis Lord—who’s watched the exchange, ashen, and has called up something relevant
on EndStat’s TREEMASTER metadecision subdirectory—now, to everyone’s horror, removes
from around his neck a shoelace with a little nickel-colored key and bends to the
small locked solander box on the food cart’s bottom shelf and as everyone watches
in horror opens the box and with near-ceremonial care exchanges the white beanie on
his head for the red beanie that signifies Utter Global Crisis. The dreaded red UGC
beanie has been donned by an Eschaton game-master only once before, and that was over
three years ago, when human input-error on EndStat tallies of aggregate SUFDDIR during
a three-way SACPOP free-for-all yielded an apparent ignition of the earth’s atmosphere.

Now a real-world chill descends over the grainily white-swirled landscape of the nuclear
theater.

Pemulis tells Lord he cannot believe his
fucking
eyes. He tells Lord how dare he don the dreaded red beanie over such an obvious instance
of map-not-territory equivocationary horseshit as Ingersoll’s trying to foist.

Lord, bent to the cart’s blinking Yushityu, responds that there seems to be a problem.

Ingersoll is whistling and pretending to do the Charleston between Abu Kemal and Es
Suweida, using his racquet like a hoofer’s cane.

Hal finally spits.

Under Pemulis’s wild-eyed stare, Lord clears his throat and calls out to Ingersoll,
tentatively positing that today’s pre-game Triggering-Situation negotiations established
no valid strategic target areas in the postage-stamp-sized nation of Sierra Leone.

Ingersoll calls back across the Mediterranean that target areas of keen strategic
interest appeared in Sierra Leone at the exact moment the heads of state and total
launch capacities of AMNAT and SOVWAR took it upon themselves to traipse into Sierra
Leone. That Sierra Leone thenceforward as of that moment has, or rather had, he pretends
to correct with a smile, become a de facto SSTRAC. If presidents and premiers wanted
to leave the protection of their territories’ defense-nets and hold cliquey little
other-Combatant-excluding parleys in some hut somewhere that was up to them, but Lord
had been wearing the white beanie that explicitly authorized the overexploited and
underdeveloped defenders of the One True Faith of the world to keep on pursuing their
strategic interests, and IRLIBSYR was now keenly interested in the aggregate INDDIR-points
it had coming to them for just now vaporizing both super-Combatants’ strategic capacities
with one Flaming-Sword-of-The-Most-High-like strike.

Ann Kittenplan keeps taking a couple quivery steps toward Ingersoll and getting restrained
and pulled back by LaMont Chu.

‘Sleepy T.P.’ Peterson, who always looks a little dazed even in the best of circumstances,
asks Otis P. Lord to define
equivocationary
for him, causing Hal Incandenza to laugh out loud despite himself.

Just outside the theater’s fence, Pemulis is bug-eyed with fury—not impossibly ’drine-aggravated—and
is literally jumping up and down in one spot so hard that his yachting cap jumps slightly
off his head with each impact, which Troeltsch and Axford confer and agree they have
previously seen occur only in animated cartoons. Pemulis howls that Lord is in his
vacillation appeasing Ingersoll in Ingersoll’s effort to fatally fuck with the very
breath and bread of Eschaton.
¹³⁰
Players themselves can’t be valid targets. Players aren’t inside the goddamn game.
Players are part of the
apparatus
of the game. They’re part of the map. It’s snowing on the players but not on the
territory. They’re part of the
map,
not the clusterfucking
territory.
You can only launch against the
territory.
Not against the
map.
It’s like the one ground-rule boundary that keeps Eschaton from degenerating into
chaos. Eschaton gentlemen is about logic and axiom and mathematical probity and discipline
and verity and
order.
You do not get points for hitting anybody real. Only the gear that
maps
what’s real. Pemulis keeps looking back over his shoulder to the pavilion and screaming
‘
Jay
sus!’

Ingersoll’s roommate J. J. Penn tries to claim that the vaporized Ann Kittenplan is
wearing several articles of gear worth mucho INDDIR, and everyone tells him to shut
up. The snow is now coming down hard enough to compose an environment, and everybody
outside the sheltered pavilion looks gauzily shrouded, from Hal’s perspective.

Lord is crunching madly away at the TP under the just-opened protection of an old
beach umbrella a previous game-master had welded to the top of the food cart. Lord
wipes his nose against the same shoulder that’s clamping a phone to his ear, awkwardly,
and reports he’s checked the D.E.C.’s Eschaton-Axiom directory via Pink
₂
-capable modem and that unfortunately with all due respect to Ann and Mike it doesn’t
seem to explicitly say players with strategic functions can’t become target-areas
if they traipse around outside their defense-nets. LaMont Chu says how come point-values
for actual players have never been assigned, then, for Pete’s sake, and Pemulis shouts
across that that’s so totally beside the point it doesn’t matter, that the reason
players aren’t explicitly exempted in the ESCHAX.DIR is that their exemption is what
makes Eschaton and its axioms fucking possible in the
first
place. A kind of pale boat-wake of exhaust exits the idling Ford sedan off behind
the pavilion and widens as it rises, dispersing. Pemulis says because otherwise use
your heads otherwise nonstrategic emotions would get aroused and Combatants would
be whacking balls at each other’s physical persons all the time and Eschaton wouldn’t
even be possible in its icily elegant game-theoretical form. He’s stopped jumping
up and down, at least, Troeltsch observes. Players’ exemption from strikes goes without
saying, Pemulis says; it’s like
pre
axiomatic. Pemulis tells Lord to consider what he’s doing very carefully, because
from where Pemulis is standing Lord looks to be willing to very possibly compromise
Eschaton’s map for all time. Girls 16’s/18’s prorector Mary Esther Thode putts from
left to right behind the pavilion on the long driveway from the circular drive to
the portcullis and halts her scooter and lifts her helmet’s tinted visor and yells
across for Kittenplan to put a hat on if she’s going to play in the snow in a crew-cut.
This even though Kittenplan isn’t even strictly in Ms. Thode’s like umbrella of authority,
Axford observes to Troeltsch, who relays this fact into his headset. Hal moves his
mouth around to try to gather up spit in a mouth that’s gotten rather dry, which when
you have a plug of Kodiak in is not very pleasant. Ann Kittenplan has been suffering
from what look like almost Parkinsonian tremors for the last few minutes, her face
writhing and her mustache almost standing right out straight. LaMont Chu repeats his
claim that there’s no way players even with strategic functions can ever be legit
target-areas if no INDDIR/SUFDDIR values have been entered for them in EndStat’s tally-function.
Pemulis orders Chu not to distract Otis Lord from the incredibly potent and lethal
ground Lord’s letting Ingersoll lead them onto. He says none of them have ever even
seen the true meaning of the word
crisis
yet. Ingersoll calls over to Pemulis that his emeritus veto-power is only over Lord’s
calculations, not over today’s game’s God’s decisions about what’s part of the game
and what isn’t. Pemulis invites Ingersoll to do something anatomically impossible.
Pemulis asks LaMont Chu and Ann Kittenplan if they’re just going to stand there with
their thumbs in their bottoms and let Lord let Ingersoll eliminate Eschaton’s map
for keeps for one slimy cheesy victory in just one day’s apocalypse. Kittenplan has
been trembling and feeling at the back of her vein-laced head and looking across the
Mediterranean at Ingersoll like somebody who knows they’ll go to prison for what they
want to do. Axford posits certain very unlikely physical conditions under which what
Pemulis told Ingersoll to do to himself wouldn’t be totally impossible. Hal spits
thickly and gathers and tries to spit again, watching. Troeltsch broadcasts the fact
that there’s always a queer vague vitaminish stink about Mary Esther Thode that he
never can quite place. There’s the sudden tripartite whump of three Empire Waste Displacement
vehicles being propelled above the cloud-cover to points far north. Hal identifies
Thode’s ambient odor as the stink of thiamine, which for reasons best known to Thode
she takes a lot of; and Troeltsch broadcasts the datum and refers to Hal as a ‘close
source,’ which strikes Hal as odd and somehow off in a way he can’t quite name. Kittenplan
shakes Chu’s arm loose and darts over and extracts a warhead from SOVWAR’s portable
stockpile and shouts out that well OK then if players can be targets then in that
case: and she fires a real screamer at Ingersoll’s head, which Ingersoll barely blocks
with his Rossignol and shrieks that Kittenplan can’t launch anything at anything because
she’s been vaporized by a 5-megaton contact-burst. Kittenplan tells Ingersoll to write
his congressman about it and over LaMont Chu’s pleas for reasoned discussion takes
several more theoretically valuable warheads out of the industrial-solvent bucket
and gets truly serious about hitting Ingersoll, moving steadily east across Nigeria
and Chad, causing Ingersoll to run due north across the courts’ map at impressive
speed, abandoning IRLIBSYR’s ammo-bucket and tear-assing up through Siberia crying
Foul. Lord’s mewing ineffectually for order, but some of the other Combatants’ staffs
have begun to smell that Evan Ingersoll’s become fair game for cruelty—the way kids
can seem to smell this sort of thing out with such uncanny acuity—and REDCHI’s General
Secretary and an AMNAT vector-planning specialist and Josh Gopnik all start moving
northeast over the map firing balls as hard as they can at Ingersoll, who’s dropped
his launcher and is shaking frantically at the chained gate on the fence’s north side,
where Mrs. Incandenza has decided she doesn’t want kids exiting the East Courts and
trampling her calliopsis; and these little kids can hit balls exceptionally hard.
Hal is now unable to gather enough spit to spit. One warhead hits Ingersoll in the
neck and another solidly in the meat of the thigh. Ingersoll begins to limp around
in small circles holding his neck, crying in that slow-motion shuddery way little
kids have when they’re crying more at the fact of being hurt than at the hurt itself.
Pemulis is walking backwards away from the south fence back toward the pavilion and
has both arms up in either appeal or fury or something else. Axford tells Hal and
Troeltsch he wishes he didn’t feel the dark thrill he felt watching Ingersoll get
pummeled. Some filmy red peanut-skin has gotten into Jim Struck’s hair as he lies
there motionless. O. P. Lord attempts to rule that Ingersoll is no longer on the four
courts of Eschaton’s earth-map and so isn’t even theoretically a valid target-area.
It doesn’t matter. Several kids close in on Ingersoll, triangulating their bombardment,
T. Peterson on point. Ingersoll is hit several times, once right near the eye. Jim
Troeltsch is up and running to the fence wanting to stop the thing, but Pemulis catches
him by his headset’s cord and tells him to let them all lie in their own bed. Hal,
now leaning forward, steeple-fingered, finds himself just about paralyzed with absorption.
Trevor Axford, fist to his chin, asks Hal if he’s ever just simply fucking
hated
somebody without having any idea why. Hal finds himself riveted at something about
the degenerating game that seems so terribly abstract and fraught with implications
and consequences that even thinking about how to articulate it seems so complexly
stressful that being almost incapacitated with absorption is almost the only way out
of the complex stress. Now INDPAK’s Penn and AMNAT’s McKenna, who have long-standing
personal bones to pick with Ann Kittenplan, peel off and gather ordnance and execute
a pincer movement on Ann Kittenplan. She is hit twice from behind at close range.
Ingersoll has long since gone down and is still getting hit. Lord is ruling at the
top of his lungs that there’s no way AMNAT can launch against itself when he gets
tagged right on the breastbone by an errant warhead. Clutching his chest with one
hand, with the other he flicks the red beanie’s propeller, never before flicked, whose
flicked spin heralds a worst-case-&-utterly-decontrolled-Armageddon-type situation.
Timmy Peterson takes a ball in the groin and goes down like a sack of refined flour.
Everybody’s scooping up spent warheads and totally unrealistically refiring them.
The fences shudder and sing as balls rain against them. Ingersoll now resembles some
sort of animal that’s been run over in the road. Troeltsch, who’s looking for the
first time at the idling sedan by West House’s dumpsters and asking if anybody knew
anybody who drove a Nunhagen-Aspirin-adverting Ford, is the only upperclass spectator
who doesn’t seem utterly silently engrossed. Ann Kittenplan has dropped her racquet
and is charging McKenna. She takes two contact-bursts in the breast-area before she
gets to him and lays McKenna out with an impressive left cross. LaMont Chu tackles
Todd Possalthwaite from behind. Struck looks to have wet his pants in his sleep. J.
J. Penn slips on a grounded warhead near Fiji and goes spectacularly down. The snowfall
makes everything gauzy and terribly clear at the same time, eliminating all visual
background so that the map’s action seems stark and surreal. Nobody’s using tennis
balls now anymore. Josh Gopnik punches LaMont Chu in the stomach, and LaMont Chu yells
that he’s been punched in the stomach. Ann Kittenplan has Kieran McKenna in a headlock
and is punching him repeatedly on the top of the skull. Otis P. Lord lets down the
beach umbrella and starts pushing his crazy-wheeled food cart at a diskette-rattling
clip toward 12’s open south gate, still flicking furiously at the red beanie’s propeller.
Struck’s hair is steadily accreting nut-skins. Pemulis is under cover but still standing,
his legs well apart and his arms folded. The figure in the green Ford still hasn’t
moved once. Troeltsch says he for his own part wouldn’t be just sitting and lying
there if any of the Little Buddies under his personal charge were out there getting
potentially injured, and Hal reflects that he does feel a certain sort of intense
anxiety, but can’t sort through the almost infinite-seeming implications of what Troeltsch
is saying fast enough to determine whether the anxiety is over something about what
he’s seeing or something in the connection between what Troeltsch is saying and the
degree to which he’s absorbed in what’s going on out inside the fence, which is a
degenerative chaos so complex in its disorder that it’s hard to tell whether it seems
choreographed or simply chaotically disordered. LaMont Chu is throwing up into the
Indian Ocean. Todd Possalthwaite has his hands to his face and is shrieking something
about his ‘
doze.
’ It is now, beyond any argument or equivocation, snowing. The sky is off-white. Lord
and his cart are now literally making tracks for the edge of the map. Evan Ingersoll
hasn’t moved in several minutes. Penn lies in a whitening service box with one leg
bent beneath him at an impossible angle. Someone way off behind them has been blowing
an athletic whistle. Ann Kittenplan begins to chase REDCHI’s General Secretary south
across the Asian subcontinent at top speed. Pemulis is telling Hal he hates to say
he told them so. Hal can see Axford leaning way forward sheltering something tiny
from the wind as he flicks at it with a spent lighter. It occurs to him this is the
third anniversary of Axhandle losing a right finger and half his right thumb. Fierce
little J. Gopnik is flailing at the air and telling whoever wants it to come on, come
on. Otis P. Lord and his cart sail clattering across Indochina toward the southern
gate. Hal is suddenly aware that Troeltsch and Pemulis are wincing but is not himself
wincing and isn’t sure why they are wincing and is looking out into the fray trying
to determine whether he should be wincing when REDCHI’s General Secretary, calling
loudly for his mother and in full flight as he looks over his shoulder at Ann Kittenplan’s
contorted face, barrels directly into Lord’s speeding food cart. There’s a noise like
the historical sum of all cafeteria accidents everywhere. 3.6-MB diskettes take flight
like mad bats across what uncovered would be the baseline of Court 12. Different-colored
beanies spill from the rolling solander box, whose lock’s hasp is broken and protrudes
like a tongue as it rolls. The TP’s monitor and modem and Yushityu chassis, with most
of Eschaton’s nervous system on its hard drive, assume a parabolic southwest vector.
The heavy equipment’s altitude is impressive. An odd silent still moment hangs, the
TP aloft. Pemulis bellows, his hands to his cheeks. Otis P. Lord hurdles the bent
forms of food cart and General Secretary and sprints low over the court’s map’s snow,
trying to save hardware that’s now at the top of its rainbow’s arc. It’s clear Lord
won’t make it. It’s a slow-motion moment. The snowfall’s more than heavy enough now,
Hal thinks, to excuse Lord’s not seeing LaMont Chu directly before him, on his hands
and knees, throwing up. Lord impacts Chu’s arched form at about knee-level and is
spectacularly airborne. The idling Ford reveals a sudden face at the driver’s-side
window. Axford is holding the lighter’s chassis up to his ear and shaking it. Ann
Kittenplan is ramming REDCHI’s leader’s face repeatedly into the mesh of the south
fence. Lord’s flight’s parabola is less spectacular on the y-axis than the TP’s has
been. The Yushityu’s hard-drive chassis makes an indescribable sound as it hits the
earth and its brightly circuited guts come out. The color monitor lands on its back
with its screen blinking ERROR at the white sky. Hal and everyone else can project
Lord’s flight’s own terminus an instant before impact. For a brief moment that Hal
will later regard as completely and uncomfortably bizarre, Hal feels at his own face
to see whether he is wincing. The distant whistle patweets. Lord does indeed go headfirst
down through the monitor’s screen, and stays there, his sneakers in the air and his
warm-up pants sagging upward to reveal black socks. There’d been a bad sound of glass.
Penn flails on his back. Possalthwaite, Ingersoll, and McKenna bleed. The second shift’s
1600h. siren down at Sunstrand Power & Light is creepily muffled by the no-sound of
falling snow.