Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2002 09:12:29 -0800
From: Michael Andre-Driussi 
Subject: Re: (urth) PEACE: visiting the doctors

Oops, correction!
>Since I'm not advocating time travel, I cannot help but wonder if Weer's
>attempt to warn Dr. Black, which was received as if he was Cassandra,
>didn't in fact get back to Bobby, who received it as some kind of weird
>threat . . . which prompted the fight on the stairs.  (Standard time travel
>trap.)
>

I =am= advocating time travel!  That was a slip of the keypad.

My textual reference here is the fact that when Bobby arrives at Weer's
party he is already presented in a belligerent mode, and we never get any
backstory as to why this is the case.

More on this one:
>I also wonder at this detail: one of the last things Dr. V says is "Could
>you come back this afternoon," but the whole trippy doctor's office thread
>started very specifically at 1:30 pm (first few pages of the book).  It was
>already afternoon when they started.  If the doctor was in the same
>timeframe, he would probably say "later this afternoon" or "this evening,"
>but as it stands it seems as though Dr. V's interview with Weer has
>happened in the morning hours.

I toy with the notion that we have been given the doctor thread out of
sequence: that Weer walking in at 1:30 is Weer going to his afternoon
appointment.  (Which would make it 1963 when he is walking in.)  And then
the other 1963 material we see is from earlier that same day.

If this mental breakdown was for outside observers a single episode that
happened for a few hours one morning in 1963, then it is not too difficult
to imagine a sheepish Weer going to the afternoon appointment now normal
again (his "possession" is past), and everybody can chalk it up to
overwork.

In any event, according to the slippery text, Weer went from the doctor's
office to the factory and there started reading the letter from Charlie
Turner.  Again, this points to a specific time circa 1963, and it seems to
rule out the Doris letter as being a mundane cause of the mental breakdown
(since it comes after the episode at the doctor's office).  So the
breakdown would seem to have happened between the time of Charlie's visit
and the arrival of Charlie's letter.

The time-slippage continues, however; and where Weer once thought he was in
the memory mansion casting his mind back, now he seems enmeshed in the
mundane timeline but with thoughts that it is all an illusion.  He rings
the buzzer for Miss Birkhead in 1963 (the day of his brief mental
breakdown) and 1974's Miss Hadow answers (the day of his death).

=mantis=



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