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For some reason now I am thinking of the sort of philanthropist who seems humanly repellent not in spite of his charity but because of it: on some level you can tell that he views the recipients of his charity not as persons so much as pieces of exercise equipment on which he can develop and demonstrate his own virtue. What’s creepy and repellent is that this sort of philanthropist clearly needs privation and suffering to continue, since it is his own virtue he prizes, instead of the ends to which the virtue is ostensibly directed.

Everything Orin’s mother is about is always terribly well-ordered and multivalent. I suspect she was badly abused as a child. I have nothing concrete to back this up.

But if, Ms. Bainbridge, you have yielded your own charms to Orin, and if Orin strikes you as a wonderfully gifted and giving lover — which by various accounts he is — not just skilled and sensuous but magnificently generous, empathic, attentive, loving — if it seems to you that he does, truly, derive his own best pleasure from giving you pleasure, you might wish to reflect soberly on this vision of Orin imitating his dear Moms as philanthropist: a person closing in, arms open wide, smiling.

[271] (including K. McKenna, who claims to have a bruised skull but does not in fact have a bruised skull)

[272] This is why Ann Kittenplan, way more culpable for Eschaton-damage than any of the other kids, isn’t down here on the punitive cleanup crew, is that it’s become a defacto Tunnel Club operation. LaMont Chu was nominated to tell her she could blow it off and they’d mark her down as present, which was just fine with Ann Kittenplan, since even the butchest little girls don’t seem to have this proto-masculine fetish for enclosure underneath things.

[273] = Stars, shooting stars, falling stars.

[274]Poutrincourt uses the Nuck idiom réflechis instead of the more textbook reflexes, and does indeed sound like the real Canadian McCoy, though her accent is without the long moany suffixes of Marathe, and but anyway it is for certain that a certain ‘journalist’ will be e-mailing Falls Church VA on the U.S.O.’s Clipper-proof line for the unexpurgated files on one ‘Poutrincourt, Thierry T.’

[275] Using s’annuler instead of the more Québecois se détruire.

[276] Using the vulgate Québecois transperçant, whose idiomatic connotation of doom Poutrincourt shouldn’t have had any reason to think the Parisian-speaking Steeply would know, which is the slip that indicates that Poutrincourt’s figured out that Steeply is neither a civilian soft-profiler nor even a female, which Poutrincourt’s probably known ever since Steeply’d lit his Flanderfume with the elbow of his lighter-arm out instead of in, which only males and radically butch lesbians ever do, and which together with the electrolysis-rash comprises the only real chink in the operative’s distaff persona, and would require an almost professionally hypervigilant and suspicious person to notice the significance of.