meanings had collapsed to such a narrow focus that no other activity or connection could hold their attention. Possessed of roughly the mental/ spiritual energies of a moth, now, according to a diagnostician out of C.D.C. The Berkeley cartridge had vanished from an S.F.P.D. Evidence Room an electron-microscopy toss of which had revealed flannel fibers. The D.E.A. had lost four field researchers and a consultant before they’d bowed to the intractable problems involved in trying to have somebody view the confiscated Tempe cartridge and articulate the thing’s lethal charms. The strongest possible language had been necessary to restrain a certain Famous Crooner from attempting a personal review of the thing’s qualities. Neither C.D.C. nor the entertainment pros wanted any part of any controlled-viewing tests. Three members of the Academy of D.A.S. had received unlabelled copies in the mail, and the one who’d actually sat down to have a look now needed a receptacle under his chin at all times. Reports of the thing popping up yet again in metro Boston MA remain unsubstantiated. Tine’s been dispatched here in part to coordinate substantiation. There’s also the special pocket-Franklin-Planner-sized chart he charts the daily A.M. penis-measurement in, daily, though to the uninitiated the little leather notebook could look like almost anything statistical at all. By now several U.S.O. test-subjects, volunteers from the federal and military penal systems, have been lost in attempts to produce a description of the cartridge’s contents. The Tempe and New Iberia cartridges are in custody, vaulted. A sociopathic and mentally retarded Lance Corporal at Leaven-worth, strapped down with electrode appliques and headset-recorder, was able to report that the thing apparently opens with an engaging and high-quality cinematic shot of a veiled woman going through a large building’s revolving doors and catching a glimpse of someone else in the revolving doors, somebody the sight of whom makes her veil billow, before the subject’s mental and spiritual energies abruptly declined to a point where even near-lethal voltages through the electrodes couldn’t divert his attention from the Entertainment. Tine’s staff had sifted through dozens of entries before deciding that the intelligence community’s terse little name for the allegedly enslaving Entertainment would be ‘the samizdat.’ P.E.T.s on sacrificed subjects revealed unexceptional wave-activity, with not near enough alpha to indicate hypnosis or induced dopamine-surges. Attempts to trace the matrix of the samizdat without viewing it — from induction on postal codes, e-micros-copíes on the brown padded mailers, immolation and chromatography on the unlabelled cartridge-cases, extensive and maddening interviews of those civilians exposed — place the likely dissemination-point someplace along the U.S. north border, with routing hubs in metro Boston/New Bedford and/or somewhere in the desert Southwest. The U.S.’s Canadian Problem is U.S.O.U.S. Anti-Anti-O.N.A.N. Activities’ Agency’s[229] special province. So to speak. The possibility of Canadian involvement in the lethally compelling Entertainment’s dissemination is what has brought to metro Boston Rodney Tine, his retinue, and his ruler.
LATE P.M., MONDAY 9 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
For reasons that Pemulis couldn’t for the life of him, Ortho Stice seemed to be in there in Dr. Dolores Rusk’s office, interfacing with Dr. Rusk well after regular hours. Pemulis paused at the door on his way by.
‘— nical assessment, after our work together on your fear of weights, would be that your presenting maladjustment, Ortho, like many males and athletes, is that you’re suffering from counterphobia.’
‘Fear of linoleum?’ It was unmistakably the flat twang of The Darkness in there through the door’s wood.
‘On the level of objects and a projective infantile omnipotence where you experience magical thinking about your thoughts and the behavior of objects’ relation to your narcissistic wishes, the counterphobia presents as the delusion of some special agency or control to compensate for some repressed wounded inner trauma having to do with absence of control.’
‘Over linoleum?’
‘My suggestion might be to forget linoleum and objects in general. In for instance an analytic model, the types of traumas counterphobic reactions cover are almost always pre-Oedipal, at which stage objects’ cathexis is Oedipal and symbolic. For example small children’s dolls and Action-Figurines.’
‘I don’t play with no goddamn Action-Figurines.’
‘GI Joe typically being cathected as an image of the potent but antagonistic father, the “military” man, with “GI” representing at once the “General Issue” of a “weapon” the Oedipal child both covets and fears and a well-known medical acronym for the gastro-intestinal tract, with all the attendant anal anxieties that require repression in the Oedipal phase’s desire to control the bowels in order to impress or quote “win” the mother, of whom the Barbie might be seen as the most obviously reductive and phallocentric reduction of the mother to an archetype of sexual function and availability, the Barbie as image of the Oedipal mother as image.’
‘So you’re saying I’m overestimating objects?’
‘I’m saying there’s a very young Ortho in there with some very real abandonment-issues who needs some nurturing and championing from the older Ortho instead of indulging in fantasies of omnipotence.’
‘I ain’t omnipotent and I don’t want to X no Goddamn Barbiedoll.’ Then Dark’s voice went way up and cracked as he said something about his bed.