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‘Q.’

‘Absolutely no, no, nothing got recorded or filmed. Reality being camera-free, being the joke I’ll again underline. Nobody even knew what the guy in the phone book had been doing, nobody knew what the Drama had been. Although they liked to speculate when they’d go out after the time was up to have drinks and pretend to review how the Drama went. Himself usually imagined the guy was sitting there watching cartridges, or counting some pattern in his wallpaper, or looking out the window. It wasn’t impossible maybe even the name you hit with the dart was somebody dead in the last year and the phone book hadn’t caught up, and here was this guy who was dead and just a random name in a phone book and the subject of what people for a few months — until Himself couldn’t keep a straight face anymore or had had enough revenge on the critics, because the critics were hailing — not just the critics in on the joke, but actual tenure-jockeys who were getting tenure to assess and dismiss and hail — they were hailing this as the ultimate in avant-garde Neorealism, and saying maybe The Stork deserved reappraisal, for a Drama with no audience and oblivious actors who might have moved away or died. A certain Mad Stork got two grants out of it and later made a lot of enemies because he refused to give them back after the hoax was like unveiled. The whole thing was kind of bats. He spread the grant money for Found Drama around a couple of local improvisation companies. It’s not like he kept the money. It’s not like he needed it. I think he especially liked the idea that the star of the show might have already moved away or recently died and there was no way to know.’

[146] See for example Incandenza’s first narrative collaboration w/ Infernatron-Canada, the animated Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell, made at the acknowledged height of his anticonfluential period — B.S. Private Release, L.M.P.

[147] The festivity here being due largely to the fact that both he and Gerhardt Schtitt returned from putting on little E.T.A. presentations at various tennis clubs too late to have been informed about the degenerative Eschaton free-for-all and serious Lord-, Ingersoll-, and Penn-injuries, both trainer Barry Loach and prorector Rik Dunkel having told Avril, and Schtitt to be told by whichever of Nwangi and deLint first works up the pluck, and the issue of telling Tavis being as would be S.O.P. left up to Avril, who will — because Tavis has already lost a certain amount of sleep preparing emotionally and rhetorically for the impending arrival of putative Moment journalist ‘Helen’ Steeply, whom he’s been convinced to let onto the grounds by Avril’s argument that the Moment office promises the profile’s subject and inevitable hype involve only an E.T.A. alumnus (Avril neglected to tell Tavis she was pretty sure it was Orin) and that a certain amount of soft-news-publicity for E.T.A.-qua-institution couldn’t hurt in either the fundraising- or the recruiting-goodwill department — who will almost certainly wait and tell Tavis (who’s in far too festive a mood to notice three or four younger kids ominously absent from the supper and gala) in the morning, if the poor man’s to have a chance at any real sleep at all (also giving Avril time to figure out how upperclass heads can roll, as of course they must, given chaos and season-ending injuries under the direct gaze of designated Big Buddies, without those heads including that of Hal, who — unlike, thank God, John — was identified at the scene with that Pemulis person). Hal can tell just by the dining hall’s emotional gestalt that neither Schtitt nor Tavis knows about the Eschaton, but the Moms is next to impossible to read, and Hal won’t know whether she’s been told of the debacle until he is able to pry Mario away from Anton (The Boogerman’) Doucette and get the Moms-skinny right from Booboo direct, after the film.