Where We're At: Parts 3.2-3.3: Bilocations

Merle Rideout

• Badly misses Dally. He quits the amalgamator's job at Little Hellkite and takes off for random places eastward.
• In Audacity, Iowa he meets movie projectionist, Fisk, filling in for watchmaker Wilt Flambo, trying to keep movies running. What are movies but still images and time manipulation and light?
• Merle moves on and ends up at Candlebrow, Ohio. Candlebrow is where he's been looking for that was missing in his life; the summer conference is going on.
• As a professor discusses time as circular, a tornado descends.This specific tornado keeps returning; its name is Thorvald. The scientists have tried to communicate with it.
• Another born again image (p 453)
• Merle returns year after year, taking day jobs in between.
• One day Merle sees the Inconvenience and the Chums; they're looking for hypops gear and introduce him to Roswell Bounce who Merle knew in CLeveland. Bounce lost his (patent/intellectual property) fight against Scarsdale Vibe and has turned to dynamiting for revenge.
• Roswell is searching for the light and he's heading for California where the movies are--they're the future of light.
• Famous German mathematician Hermann Minkowski comes to give a lecture on space and time.

Frank Webb

• Returns to the US and finds himself heading for Nochechita. He's looking for Estrella Briggs. He can't understand the town any more and feels like Stray, Reef, and the rest are there but he can't quite see them. He runs into schoolteacher Linnet Dawes who tells him that Reef left Stray and Jesse, and Stray and Jesse are in Fickle Creek, NM.
• Fickle Creek is full of motorcyclists. Zoltan, one of them, is scared of X shapes. [Yet another Christ image.]
• He sees Stray with regionally famous Vang Feeley; she doesn't recognize him.
• He returns to Denver where he meets up with the Reverend Moss Gatlin driving a trolley car labelled Anarchist Heaven. Gatlin heard about Sloat and says Frank needs to tell Mayva; he points Frank toward Cripple, where Mayva is.
• Frank (with Gatlin) goes to Cripple (they "could see how forlorn and beaten down that recent battleground had become. The owners had sure won.") He runs into (the) Groucho Marx (described as Julius, etc) who tells him that Mayva has an ice-cream parlor.
• Mayva tells Frank that the owners have been paying her off, window's compensation, all along (and it's still hard times for her anyway). She knows he killed Sloat Fresno. They don't discuss it but both believe that Webb was the Kieselguhr Kid--that all the carousing was a cover and never really happened. Mayva can sleep at night even knowing that Deuce is still out there--Frank doesn't need to give her happy endings; Sloat was enough for her.

page 471.