Between Gerhardt Schtitt’s pipe and Avril Incandenza’s Benson & Hedges and certain cheeks full of chewing tobacco — plus the maddening cooking-smells of honey and chocolate and real high-lipid walnuts from the kitchen vents, plus over 150 very fit bodies only some of which have been showered on this day off — the dining hall is warm and close and multi-odored. Mario as auteur opts for his late father’s parodic device of mixing real and fake news-summary cartridges, magazine articles, and historical headers from the last few great daily papers, all for a sort of time-lapse exposition of certain developments leading up to Interdependence and Subsidized Time and cartographic Reconfiguration and the renewal of a tight and considerably tidier Experialist U.S. of A., under Gentle:
UKRAINE, TWO MORE BALTIC STATES APPLY FOR NATO INCLUSION— 16-point bold Header;
SO THEN WHY A NATO? — Editorial Header;
E.E.C. SIDES WITH PACIFIC RIM, UPS TARIFFS IN RESPONSE TO U.S. QUOTAS — Header;
GENTLE ON WASTE STORAGE FROM DISMANTLED NATO THERMS: ‘NOT IN MY NATION, BABE’ — 12-point Subheader;
‘Amid smiles and two-handed handshakes that belied the high tensions here, the leaders of twelve out of fifteen NATO nations today signed an accord effectively dismantling the Western Bloc’s fifty-five-year-old defensive alliance.’ — News-Summary Cartridge Voiceover;
U.S., CANADIAN SUPPORT CUTS DOOMED NATO SUMMIT FROM START, ICELANDIC POL DECLARES — Header;
SO THEN WHY NOT A CONTINENTAL ALLIANCE, NOW, MAYBE? — Editorial Header;
MEXICO SIGNS ON FOR ‘ORGANIZATION OF NORTH AMERICAN NATIONS’ CONTINENTAL ALLIANCE; BUT QUEBEC SEPARATISTS RALLY AGAINST ‘FINLANDIZATION’ OF ‘O.N.A.N.’ ALLIANCE; BUT GENTLE TO CANADA: UNLESS ‘O.N.A.N.’ TREATY SIGNED, NAFTA NULL, MANITOBAN THERMS STAY PUT, INTRACONTINENTAL POLLUTION AND WASTE DISPOSAL EACH NATION’S ‘INTERESTS TO PURSUE TO THE BEST THEY SEE FIT’ — Header from Veteran but Methamphetamine-Dependent Head-liner Finally Demoted after Repeated Warnings about Taking up Too Much Space;
FED WORKERS PROTEST RANDOM FINGERNAIL-HYGIENE SCREENS — 12-point Header;
GENTLE PROPOSES NATIONALIZATION OF INTERLACE TELENT — Header; SAYS GOVT IN LINE FOR ‘PIECE OF THE ACTION’ ON VIDEO, CARTRIDGE, DISK RENTALS — 8-point subheader;
BURGER KING’S PILLSBURY AWARDED RIGHTS TO NEW YEAR — Header; PIZZA HUT’S PEPSICO FILES BID-RIGGING COMPLAINT WITH IRS — 12-point Subheader; CALENDAR AND PREPRINTED CHECK INDUSTRIES STOCKS SOAR — 8-point subheader;
Three blue-jawed convicts in antiquated stripes dicky their cell’s lock and run, backed by sirens and searchlights’ crisscrossed play, not for the wall but straight to the Warden’s empty nighttime office, where they sit rapt before his old dual-modem Macintosh, slapping their knees and pointing to the monitor and elbowing each other in the ribs, nibbling at inexplicably-appeared boxes of popcorn, with a Voiceover: ‘Cartridges by Modem! Just Insert a Blank Diskette! Break Free of the Confinement of Your Channel Selector!’ — Some more of Ms. Heath’s classes’ puppets in a B-film parody of the InterLace TelEntertainment ads that the cable networks seemed so mysteriously suicidally to run all the time that last year of Unsubsidized Time;
O.N.A.N. PACT PENNED — 24-point Superheader;
CANADA ‘NUCK’LES UNDER — Tabloidish NY Daily’s 24-point Superheader;
ACID RAIN, LANDFILLS, BARGES, FUSION-TECH, MANITOBAN THERMS WERE ‘BIG STICKS,’ CHRETIEN ADMITS—16-point Header;
SHORT-HAIRED MEN IN SHINY TRUCKS ARE NOT DISMANTLING MANITOBAN THERMS BUT INSTEAD MOVING THEM JUST OVER BORDER INTO TURTLE MTN. INDIAN RESERVATION, HORRIFIED N.D. GOV CHARGES — 12-point Subheader from Demoted Headliner Already in Dutch Down in the Subheader Dept., Now, Too;
EXCLUSIVE COLOR PHOTOS SHOW BRAVE DOCS FUTILELY FIGHTING TIME TO REMOVE RAILROAD SPIKE FROM CANADIAN PRIME MINISTER’S RIGHT EYE — Tabloidish NY Daily’s 16-point Header;
PRESIDENT’S OFFICE IS ‘A ANALLY RETENTIVE HORROR SHOW SAYS THIS JUST RETIRED WHITE HOUSE CUSTODIAN — Tabloid Header with Photo of Old Guy with Basically One Eyebrow Running All
the Way across His Forehead Holding up a Mammoth Plastic Barrel He Claims Held Just One Day’s Haul of Dental Stimulators, Alcohol-Soaked Cotton Puffs, GI–X-Ray-Grade Colonic Purgative Bottles, Epidermal Ash, Surgical Masks and Gloves, Q-Tïps, Kleenex, and Homeopathic Pruritis-Cream Containers;
U.S.O.U.S. CHIEF TINE: CHARGES OF AN OVAL OFFICE LITTERED WITH KLEENEX AND FLOSS A ‘CLEAR CASE OF DIRTY TRICKS’ — Respectable Daily Header;
OVERLOADED WASTE BARGES COLLIDE, CAPSIZE OFF GLOUCESTER — Boston Daily Header;
HUGE PUTRID SLICK EMPTIES BEACHES OFF BOTH SHORES, CAPE — Equally Large Subheader;
GENTLE SPEAKS OUT ON A U.S. ‘CONSTIPATEDLY IMPACTED ON CONTINENTAL WASTE’ AT U.N.L.V. COMMENCEMENT-Header;
AD COUNCIL REPORT: BOSTON’S VINEY & VEALS AGENCY’S LI-POSUCTION AND TONGUE-STICK CAMPAIGNS NOT TO BLAME FOR ABC HQ BOMB THREATS — Advertising Age Header;
‘The Governors of Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire today reacted strongly to President Gentle’s establishment of a blue-ribbon panel of waste experts to investigate the feasibility of mass landfill and conversion sites in northern New England’ — Respectable NY Daily’s Lead ‘Graph;
‘WE ARE NOT THIS CONTINENT’S SIGMOID COLON,’ GENTLE WARNS O.N.A.N. JOINT SESSION — Header;
BETHESDA MD’S: STRICKEN PRESIDENT CONFINED FOR ‘HYGIENIC STRESS’ FOLLOWING INCOHERENT O.N.A.N. ADDRESS — Header;
HOLOGRAPHY MAKES ULTRA-TOXIC FUSION GAMBIT SAFE FOR WORKERS, COMMUNITY, D.O.E. REP ASSURES METHUEN P.T.A. — Boston Daily Header;
GENTLE OUT OF BETHESDA NAVAL HOSP CONFINEMENT, TO ADDRESS U.S. CONGRESS ON ‘RECONFIGURATIVE OPTIONS’ FOR ‘TIGHT, TIDIER NATIONAL ERA’ — Header, all these twirling journalistically out from a black-acetate (one of O. Stice’s old Fila warm-up tops) background in vintagely allusive old-b&w-film style, with a sonic background of that sad sappy Italianate stuff Scorcese had loved for his own montages, with the headlines lap-dissolving into transverse-angled shots of a modest, green-masked Gentle accepting tight-lipped handshakes from Mexican and Canadian officials in an agreement to make the U.S. President the first Chair of the Organization of North American Nations, with Mexican Presidente and new heavily guarded Canadian P.M. to be co-Vice Chairs. Gentle’s first State of the O.N.A.N. Address, delivered before a triple-size Congress on the very last day of ‘B.S.’ solar time, holds out the promise of a whole bright spanking new millennium of sacrifices and rewards and Interdependence’s ‘not impossibly radically altered new look,’ continent-wide.
Do not underestimate objects! Lyle says he finds it impossible to over-stress this: do not underestimate objects. Partridge KS’s serve-and-volley prodigy Ortho (‘The Darkness’) Stice, 16-A’s very top man, whose sauna-fresh torso gleams the same color as the moonlight off the idle weights’ metal, is being driven right to the edge by the fact that he goes to sleep with his bed against one wall and then but wakes up with his bed against a whole nother wall. Stice’d already had a whole series of beefs with roommate Kyle D. Coyle because he’d figured clearly Coyle was moving Stice’s bed around in Stice’s sleep. But then Coyle got put in the infirmary with a suspicious discharge, and he’s been out of the room for the last two nights, Coyle, and here Stice is still waking up with his bed against a different wall. So then he thought like Axford or Struck was dickying his door with a meal-card and sneaking in really late and messing with Stice’s bed out of obscure motives. So but last night Stice jammed a chair up against his door and piled empty tennis-ball cans on the chair to make a racket if there was any dickying, and lined up still more cans on the sills of all three windows, just to cover all bases; and but so the reason he’s here is this A.M. he wakes up with his bed moved over against the chair by the door at an angle he didn’t care for one bit and with all the ball-cans arranged in a neat pyramid in the dusty rectangle where his bed was supposed to normally be. Ortho Stice can think of only three possible explanations for what’s going on, and he presents them to an attentive cheek-sucking Lyle in ascending order of grimness. One is that Stice is telekinetic, but only in his sleep. Two is that somebody else at E.T.A. is telekinetic and has it in for Stice and wants to drive him batsoid for some reason. Three is that Stice is like getting up in his sleep and rearranging the room without knowing it or remembering it, which means he’s a severe fucking somnambulist, which means Lord only knows what all else he could get up and wander around and do in his sleep. He’s got promise, the Staff say; he’s got a quite legit shot at the Show when he graduates. Which he does not want to mess up with any sort of telekinetic or somnambulistical shenanigans. Stice offers up the planes of his torso and forehead. He wears one of his own personal towels, a black one. He is slim but wiry and beautifully muscled, and sweats freely and well. He says he knows too well he’d neglected Lyle’s advice about the pull-down station two years back, and regrets it. He wholeheartedly apologizes for the time last spring he got Struck and Axford to distract Lyle and then Krazy-Glued Lyle’s left buttock’s Span-dex to the wooden top of the towel dispenser. Stice says he realizes he’s the last guy with any right to come to Lyle cap in hand after all the cracks about the diet and hairstyle and all. But here he is, cap in hand, or rather calotte in hand, offering up his sauna’d planes, asking for Lyle’s input.