Page 750: Spines:

Marathe doing surveillance at Ennet House:

"...Marathe could scan along the plastic cases of cartridges' spines."

Could.

I look across the room at the spineless carcass and wonder how it will look on the Abbot's bookshelf once I am done dismembering it.

I wonder if the Abbot will eventually be able to do what Marathe did and scan along his library of other precious Works and see IJ nestled there?

What will it be like for the Abbot when he has to deal with a dismembered, tortured, spineless "novel" when he gets it back?

But I do not feel guilt. I just wonder. For I am a bold and disciplined reader. I believe in how I read.

I do acknowledge however, that without a spine, the book could eventually just lose form, flop, fall away, it's pages dispersed, lost - eventually fragmented, devoid of complete meaning.

And I wonder, will the novel, still be a novel, if even one page goes missing?

Because I do know that this book is a novel whose every page, every scene, every obscure vignette, every crazy line, is heading toward one final, brilliant, incandescent message and conclusion. And without even one page, all this meaning will fall apart. It's light will fragment as has been demonstrated by the "Investigation of Light Fragmentation Products and Pecularities of Nuclear Fission at High Energies of Incident Particles" (P.A. Goritchev et al, Radium Institute, Academy of Sciences, Leningrad, USSR).

Incident particles...