Infinite jest

WINTER, B.S. 1963, SEPULVEDA CA

I remember^[208] I was eating lunch and reading something dull by Bazin when my father came into the kitchen and made himself a tomato juice beverage and said that as soon as I was finished he and my mother needed my help in their bedroom. My father had spent the morning at the commercial studio and was still all in white, with his wig with its rigid white parted hair, and hadn’t yet removed the television makeup that gave his real face an orange cast in daylight. I hurried up and finished and rinsed my dishes in the sink and proceeded down the hall to the master bedroom. My mother and father were both in there. The master bedroom’s valance curtains and the heavy lightproof curtain behind them were all slid back and the Venetian blinds up, and the daylight was very bright in the room, the decor of which was white and blue and powder-blue.

My father was bent over my parents’ large bed, which was stripped of bedding all the way down to the mattress protector. He was bent over, pushing down on the bed’s mattress with the heels of his hands. The bed’s sheets and pillows and powder-blue coverlet were all in a pile on the carpet next to the bed. Then my father handed me his tumbler of tomato juice to hold for him and got all the way on top of the bed and knelt on it, pressing down vigorously on the mattress with his hands, putting all his weight into it. He bore down hard on one area of the mattress, then let up and pivoted slightly on his knees and bore down with equal vigor on a different area of the mattress. He did this all over the bed, sometimes actually walking around on the mattress on his knees to get at different areas of the mattress, then bearing down on them. I remember thinking the bearing-down action looked very much like emergency compression of a heart patient’s chest. I remember my father’s tomato juice had grains of pepperish material floating on the surface. My mother was standing at the bedroom window, smoking a long cigarette and looking at the lawn, which I had watered before I ate lunch. The uncovered window faced south. The room blazed with sunlight.

‘Eureka,’ my father said, pressing down several times on one particular spot.

I asked whether I could ask what was going on.

‘Goddamn bed squeaks,’ he said. He stayed on his knees over the one particular spot, bearing down on it repeatedly. There was now a squeaking sound from the mattress when he bore down on the spot. My father looked up and over at my mother next to the bedroom window. ‘Do you or do you not hear that?’ he said, bearing down and letting up. My mother tapped her long cigarette into a shallow ashtray she held in her other hand. She watched my father press down on the squeaking spot.

Sweat was running in dark orange lines down my father’s face from under his rigid white professional wig. My father served for two years as the Man from Glad, representing what was then the Glad Flaccid Plastic Receptacle Co. of Zanesville, Ohio, via a California-based advertising agency. The tunic, tight trousers, and boots the agency made him wear were also white.

My father pivoted on his knees and swung his body around and got off the mattress and put his hand at the small of his back and straightened up, continuing to look at the mattress.

‘This miserable cock-sucking bed your mother felt she needed to hang on to and bring with us out here for quote sentimental value has started squeaking,’ my father said. His saying ‘your mother’ indicated that he was addressing himself to me. He held his hand out for his tumbler of tomato juice without having to look at me. He stared darkly down at the bed. ‘It’s driving us fucking nuts.’

My mother balanced her cigarette in her shallow ashtray and laid the ashtray on the windowsill and bent over from the foot of the bed and bore down on the spot my father had isolated, and it squeaked again.

‘And at night this one spot here we’ve isolated and identified seems to spread and metastisate until the whole Goddamn bed’s replete with squeaks.’ He drank some of his tomato juice. ‘Areas that gibber and squeak,’ my father said, ‘until we both feel as if we’re being eaten by rats.’ He felt along the line of his jaw. ‘Boiling hordes of gibbering squeaking ravenous rapacious rats,’ he said, almost trembling with irritation.

I looked down at the mattress, at my mother’s hands, which tended to flake in dry climates. She carried a small bottle of moisturizing lotion at all times.

My father said, ‘And I have personally had it with the aggravation.’ He blotted his forehead on his white sleeve.

I reminded my father that he’d mentioned needing my help with something. At that age I was already taller than both my parents. My mother was taller than my father, even in his boots, but much of her height was in her legs. My father’s body was denser and more substantial.

My mother came around to my father’s side of the bed and picked the bedding up off the floor. She started folding the sheets very precisely, using both arms and her chin. She stacked the folded bedding neatly on top of her dresser, which I remember was white lacquer.

My father looked at me. ‘What we need to do here, Jim, is take the mattress and box spring off the bed frame under here,’ my father said, ‘and expose the frame.’ He took time out to explain that the bed’s bottom mattress was hard-framed and known uniformly as a box spring. I was looking at my sneakers and making my feet alternately pigeon-toed and then penguin-toed on the bedroom’s blue carpet. My father drank some of his tomato juice and looked down at the edge of the bed’s metal frame and felt along the outline of his jaw, where his commercial studio makeup ended abruptly at the turtleneck collar of his white commercial tunic.

‘The frame on this bed is old,’ he told me. ‘It’s probably older than you are. Right now I’m thinking the thing’s bolts have maybe started coming loose, and that’s what’s gibbering and squeaking at night.’ He finished his tomato juice and held the glass out for me to take and put somewhere. ‘So we want to move all this top crap out of the way, entirely’ — he gestured with one arm — ‘entirely out of the way, get it out of the room, and expose the frame, and see if we don’t maybe just need to tighten up the bolts.’

I wasn’t sure where to put my father’s empty glass, which had juice residue and grains of pepper along the inside’s sides. I poked at the mattress and box spring a little bit with my foot. ‘Are you sure it isn’t just the mattress?’ I said. The bed’s frame’s bolts struck me as a rather exotic first-order explanation for the squeaking.

My father gestured broadly. ‘Synchronícity surrounds me. Concord,’ he said. ‘Because that’s what your mother thinks it is, also.’ My mother was using both hands to take the blue pillowcases off all five of their pillows, again using her chin as a clamp. The pillows were all the overplump polyester fiberfill kind, because of my father’s allergies.

‘Great minds think alike,’ my father said.

Neither of my parents had any interest in hard science, though a great uncle had accidentally electrocuted himself with a field series generator he was seeking to patent.

My mother stacked the pillows on top of the neatly folded bedding on her dresser. She had to get up on her tiptoes to put the folded pillowcases on top of the pillows. I had started to move to help her, but I couldn’t decide where to put the empty tomato juice glass.

‘But you just want to hope it isn’t the mattress,’ father said. ‘Or the box spring.’

My mother sat down on the foot of the bed and got out another long cigarette and lit it. She carried a little leatherette snap-case for both her cigarettes and her lighter.

My father said, ‘Because a new frame, even if we can’t get the bolts squared away on this one and I have to go get a new one. A new frame. It wouldn’t be too bad, see. Even top-shelf bed frames aren’t that expensive. But new mattresses are outrageously expensive.’ He looked at my mother. ‘And I mean fucking outrageous.’ He looked down at the back of my mother’s head. ‘And we bought a new box spring for this sad excuse for a bed not five years ago.’ He was looking down at the back of my mother’s head as if he wanted to confirm that she was listening. My mother had crossed her legs and was looking with a certain concentration either at or out the master bedroom window. Our home’s whole subdivision was spread along a severe hillside, which meant that the view from my parents’ bedroom on the first floor was of just sky and sun and a foreshortened declivity of lawn. The lawn sloped at an average angle of 55° and had to be mowed horizontally. None of the subdivision’s lawns had trees yet. ‘Of course that was during a seldom-discussed point in time when your mother had to assume the burden of assuming responsibility for finances in the household,’ my father said. He was now perspiring very heavily, but still had his white professional toupee on, and still looked at my mother.

My father acted, throughout our time in California, as both symbol and spokesman for the Glad F.P.R. Co.’s Individual Sandwich Bag Division. He was the first of two actors to portray the Man from Glad. He was inserted several times a month in a mock-up of a car interior, where he would be filmed in a tight trans-windshield shot receiving an emergency radio summons to some household that was having a portable-food-storage problem. He was then inserted opposite an actress in a generic kitchen-interior set, where he would explain how a particular species of Glad Sandwich Bag was precisely what the doctor ordered for the particular portable-food-storage problem at issue. In his vaguely medical uniform of all white, he carried an air of authority and great evident conviction, and earned what I always gathered was an impressive salary, for those times, and received, for the first time in his career, fan mail, some of which bordered on the disturbing, and which he sometimes liked to read out loud at night in the living room, loudly and dramatically, sitting up with a nightcap and fan mail long after my mother and I had gone to bed.

I asked whether I could excuse myself for a moment to take my father’s empty tomato juice glass out to the kitchen sink. I was worried that the residue along the inside sides of the tumbler would harden into the kind of precipitate that would be hard to wash off.

‘For Christ’s sake Jim just put the thing down,’ my father said.

I put the tumbler down on the bedroom carpet over next to the base of my mother’s dresser, pressing down to create a kind of circular receptacle for it in the carpet. My mother stood up and went back over by the bedroom window with her ashtray. We could tell she was getting out of our way.

My father cracked his knuckles and studied the path between the bed and the bedroom door.

I said I understood my part here to be to help my father move the mattress and box spring off the suspect bed frame and well out of the way. My father cracked his knuckles and replied that I was becoming almost fright-eningly quick and perceptive. He went around between the foot of the bed and my mother at the window. He said, ‘I want to let’s just stack it all out in the hall, to get it the hell out of here and give us some room to maneuver.’

‘Right,’ I said.

My father and I were now on opposite sides of my parents’ bed. My father rubbed his hands together and bent and worked his hands between the mattress and box spring and began to lift the mattress up from his side of the bed. When his side of the mattress had risen to the height of his shoulders, he somehow inverted his hands and began pushing his side up rather than lifting it. The top of his wig disappeared behind the rising mattress, and his side rose in an arc to almost the height of the white ceiling, exceeded 90°, toppled over, and began to fall over down toward me. The mattress’s overall movement was like the crest of a breaking wave, I remember. I spread my arms and took the impact of the mattress with my chest and face, supporting the angled mattress with my chest, outspread arms, and face. All I could see was an extreme close-up of the woodland floral pattern of the mattress protector.

The mattress, a Simmons Beauty Rest whose tag said that it could not by law be removed, now formed the hypotenuse of a right dihedral triangle whose legs were myself and the bed’s box spring. I remember visualizing and considering this triangle. My legs were trembling under the mattress’s canted weight. My father exhorted me to hold and support the mattress. The respectively sharp plastic and meaty human smells of the mattress and protector were very distinct because my nose was mashed up against them.

My father came around to my side of the bed, and together we pushed the mattress back up until it stood up at 90° again. We edged carefully apart and each took one end of the upright mattress and began jockeying it off the bed and out the bedroom door into the uncarpeted hallway.

This was a King-Size Simmons Beauty Rest mattress. It was massive but had very little structural integrity. It kept curving and curling and wobbling. My father exhorted both me and the mattress. It was flaccid and floppy as we tried to jockey it. My father had an especially hard time with his half of the mattress’s upright weight because of an old competitive-tennis injury.

While we were jockeying it on its side off the bed, part of the mattress on my father’s end slipped and flopped over and down onto a pair of steel reading lamps, adjustable cubes of brushed steel attached by toggle bolts to the white wall over the head of the bed. The lamps took a solid hit from the mattress, and one cube was rotated all the way around on its toggle so that its open side and bulb now pointed at the ceiling. The joint and toggle made a painful squeaking sound as the cube was wrenched around upward. This was also when I became aware that even the reading lamps were on in the daylit room, because a faint square of direct lamplight, its four sides rendered slightly concave by the distortion of projection, appeared on the white ceiling above the skewed cube. But the lamps didn’t fall off. They remained attached to the wall.

‘God damn it to hell,’ my father said as he regained control of his end of the mattress.

My father also said, ‘Fucking son of a …’ when the mattress’s thickness made it difficult for him to squeeze through the doorway still holding his end.

In time we were able to get my parents’ giant mattress out in the narrow hallway that ran between the master bedroom and the kitchen. I could hear another terrible squeak from the bedroom as my mother tried to realign the reading lamp whose cube had been inverted. Drops of sweat were falling from my father’s face onto his side of the mattress, darkening part of the protector’s fabric. My father and I tried to lean the mattress at a slight supporting angle against one wall of the hallway, but because the floor of the hallway was uncarpeted and didn’t provide sufficient resistance, the mattress wouldn’t stay upright. Its bottom edge slid out from the wall all the way across the width of the hallway until it met the baseboard of the opposite wall, and the upright mattress’s top edge slid down the wall until the whole mattress sagged at an extremely concave slumped angle, a dry section of the woodland floral mattress protector stretched drum-tight over the slumped crease and the springs possibly damaged by the deforming concavity.

My father looked at the canted concave mattress sagging across the width of the hall and moved one end of it a little with the toe of his boot and looked at me and said, ‘Fuck it.’

My bow tie was rumpled and at an angle.

My father had to walk unsteadily across the mattress in his white boots to get back to my side of the mattress and the bedroom behind me. On his way across he stopped and felt speculatively at his jaw, his boots sunk deep in woodland floral cotton. He said ‘Fuck it’ again, and I remember not being clear about what he was referring to. Then my father turned and started unsteadily back the way he had come across the mattress, one hand against the wall for support. He instructed me to wait right there in the hallway for one moment while he darted into the kitchen at the other end of the hall on a very brief errand. His steadying hand left four faint smeared prints on the wall’s white paint.

My parents’ bed’s box spring, though also King-Size and heavy, had just below its synthetic covering a wooden frame that gave the box spring structural integrity, and it didn’t flop or alter its shape, and after another bit of difficulty for my father — who was too thick through the middle, even with the professional girdle beneath his Glad costume — after another bit of difficulty for my father squeezing with his end of the box spring through the bedroom doorway, we were able to get it into the hall and lean it vertically at something just over 70° against the wall, where it stayed upright with no problem.

‘That’s the way she wants doing, Jim,’ my father said, clapping me on the back in exactly the ebullient way that had prompted me to have my mother buy an elastic athletic cranial strap for my glasses. I had told my mother I needed the strap for tennis purposes, and she had not asked any questions.

My father’s hand was still on my back as we returned to the master bedroom. ‘Right, then!’ my father said. His mood was now elevated. There was a brief second of confusion at the doorway as each of us tried to step back to let the other through first.

There was now nothing but the suspect frame left where the bed had been. There was something exoskeletal and frail-looking about the bed frame, a plain low-ratio rectangle of black steel. At each corner of the rectangle was a caster. The casters’ wheels had sunk into the pile carpet under the weight of the bed and my parents and were almost completely submerged in the carpet’s fibers. Each of the frame’s sides had a narrow steel shelf welded at 90° to its interior’s base, so that a single rectangular narrow shelf perpendicular to the frame’s rectangle ran all around the frame’s interior. This shelf was obviously there to support the bed’s occupants and King-Size box spring and mattress.

My father seemed frozen in place. I cannot remember what my mother was doing. There seemed to be a long silent interval of my father looking closely at the exposed frame. The interval had the silence and stillness of dusty rooms immersed in sunlight. I briefly imagined every piece of furniture in the bedroom covered with sheets and the room unoccupied for years as the sun rose and crossed and fell outside the window, the room’s daylight becoming staler and staler. I could hear two power lawnmowers of slightly different pitch from somewhere down our subdivision’s street. The direct light through the master bedroom’s window swam with rotating columns of raised dust. I remember it seemed the ideal moment for a sneeze.

Dust lay thick on the frame and even hung from the frame’s interior support-shelf in little gray beards. It was impossible to see any bolts anywhere on the frame.

My father blotted sweat and wet makeup from his forehead with the back of his sleeve, which was now dark orange with makeup. ‘Jesus will you look at that mess,’ he said. He looked at my mother. ‘Jesus.’

The carpeting in my parents’ bedroom was deep-pile and a darker blue than the pale blue of the rest of the bedroom’s color scheme. I remember the carpet as more a royal blue, with a saturation level somewhere between moderate and strong. The rectangular expanse of royal blue carpet that had been hidden under the bed was itself carpeted with a thick layer of clotted dust. The rectangle of dust was gray-white and thick and unevenly layered, and the only evidence of the room’s carpet below was a faint sick bluish cast to the dust-layer. It looked as if dust had not drifted under the bed and settled on the carpet inside the frame but rather had somehow taken root and grown on it, upon it, the way a mold will take root and gradually cover an expanse of spoiled food. The layer of dust itself looked a little like spoiled food, bad cottage cheese. It was nauseous. Some of the dust-layer’s uneven topography was caused by certain lost- and litter-type objects that had found their way under the bed — a flyswatter, a roughly Variety-sized magazine, some bottletops, three wadded Kleenex, and what was probably a sock — and gotten covered and textured in dust.

There was also a faint odor, sour and fungal, like the smell of an overused bathmat.

‘Jesus, there’s even a smell,’ my father said. He made a show of inhaling through his nose and screwing up his face. ‘There’s even a fucking smell.’ He blotted his forehead and felt his jaw and looked hard at my mother. His mood was no longer elevated. My father’s mood surrounded him like a field and affected any room he occupied, like an odor or a certain cast to the light.

‘When was the last time this got cleaned under here?’ my father asked my mother.

My mother didn’t say anything. She looked at my father as he moved the steel frame around a little with his boot, which raised even more dust into the window’s sunlight. The bed frame seemed very lightweight, moving back and forth noiselessly on its casters’ submerged wheels. My father often moved lightweight objects absently around with his foot, rather the way other men doodle or examine their cuticles. Rugs, magazines, telephone and electrical cords, his own removed shoe. It was one of my father’s ways of musing or gathering his thoughts or trying to control his mood.

‘Under what presidential administration was this room last deep-cleaned, I’m standing here prompted to fucking muse out loud,’ my father said.

I looked at my mother to see whether she was going to say anything in reply.

I said to my father, ‘You know, since we’re discussing squeaking beds, my bed squeaks, too.’

My father was trying to squat down to see whether he could locate any bolts on the frame, saying something to himself under his breath. He put his hands on the frame for balance and almost fell forward when the frame rolled under his weight.

‘But I don’t think I even really noticed it until we began to discuss it,’ I said. I looked at my mother. ‘I don’t think it bothers me,’ I said. ‘Actually, I think I kind of like it. I think I’ve gradually gotten so used to it that it’s become almost comforting. At this juncture,’ I said.

My mother looked at me.

‘I’m not complaining about it,’ I said. The discussion just made me think of it.’

‘Oh, we hear your bed, don’t you worry,’ my father said. He was still trying to squat, which drew his corset and the hem of his tunic up and allowed the top of his bottom’s crack to appear above the the waist of his white pants. He shifted slightly to point up at the master bedroom’s ceiling. ‘You so much as turn over in bed up there? We hear it down here.’ He took one steel side of the rectangle and shook the frame vigorously, sending up a shroud of dust. The bed frame seemed to weigh next to nothing under his hands. My mother made a mustache of her finger to hold back a sneeze.

He shook the frame again. ‘But it doesn’t aggravate us the way this ro-dential son of a whore right here does.’

I remarked that I didn’t think I’d ever once heard their bed squeak before, from upstairs. My father twisted his head around to try to look up at me as I stood there behind him. But I said I’d definitely heard and could confirm the presence of a squeak when he’d pressed on the mattress, and could verify that the squeak was no one’s imagination.

My father held a hand up to signal me to please stop talking. He remained in a squat, rocking slightly on the balls of his feet, using the rolling frame to keep his balance. The flesh of the top of his bottom and crack-area protruded over the waist of his pants. There were also deep red folds in the back of his neck, below the blunt cut of the wig, because he was looking up and over at my mother, who was resting her tail bone on the sill of the window, still holding her shallow ashtray.

‘Maybe you’d like to go get the vacuum,’ he said. My mother put the ashtray down on the sill and exited the master bedroom, passing between me and the dresser piled with bedding. ‘If you can … if you can remember where it is!’ my father called after her.

I could hear my mother trying to get past the King-Size mattress sagging diagonally across the hall.

My father was rocking more violently on the balls of his feet, and now the rocking had the sort of rolling, side-to-side quality of a ship in high seas. He came very close to losing his balance as he leaned to his right to get a handkerchief from his hip pocket and began using it to reach out and flick dust off something at one corner of the bed frame. After a moment he pointed down next to a caster.

‘Bolt,’ he said, pointing at the side of a caster. ‘Right there’s a bolt.’ I leaned in over him. Drops of my father’s perspiration made small dark coins in the dust of the frame. There was nothing but smooth lightweight black steel surface where he was pointing, but just to the left of where he was pointing I could see what might have been a bolt, a little stalactite of clotted dust hanging from some slight protrusion. My father’s hands were broad and his fingers blunt. Another possible bolt lay several inches to the right of where he pointed. His finger trembled badly, and I believe the trembling might have been from the muscular strain on his bad knees, trying to hold so much new weight in a squat for an extended period. I heard the telephone ring twice. There had been an extended silence, with my father pointing at neither protrusion and me trying to lean in over him.

Then, still squatting on the balls of his feet, my father placed both hands on the side of the frame and leaned out over the side into the rectangle of dust inside the frame and had what at first sounded like a bad coughing fit. His hunched back and rising bottom kept me from watching him. I remember deciding that the reason the frame was not rolling under his hands’ pressure was that my father had so much of his weight on it, and that maybe my father’s nervous system’s response to heavy dust was a cough-signal instead of a sneeze-signal. It was the wet sound of material hitting the dust inside the rectangle, plus the rising odor, that signified to me that, rather than coughing, my father had been taken ill. The spasms involved made his back rise and fall and his bottom tremble under his white commercial slacks. It was not too uncommon for my father to be taken ill shortly after coming home from work to relax, but now he seemed to have been taken really ill. To give him some privacy, I went around the frame to the side of the frame closest to the window where there was direct light and less odor and examined another of the frame’s casters. My father was whispering to himself in brief expletive phrases between the spasms of his illness. I squatted easily and rubbed dust from a small area of the frame and wiped the dust on the carpet by my feet. There was a small carriage-head bolt on either side of the plating that attached the caster to the bed frame. I knelt and felt one of the bolts. Its round smooth head made it impossible either to tighten or loosen. Putting my cheek to the carpet and examining the bottom of the little horizontal shelf welded to the frame’s side, I observed that the bolt seemed threaded tightly and completely through its hole, and I decided it was doubtful that any of the casters’ platings’ bolts were producing the sounds that reminded my father of rodents.

Just at this time, I remember, there was a loud cracking sound and my area of the frame jumped violently as my father’s illness caused him to faint and he lost his balance and pitched forward and lay prone and asleep over his side of the bed frame, which as I rolled away from the frame and rose to my knees I saw was either broken or very badly bent. My father lay facedown in the mixture of the rectangle’s thick dust and the material he’d brought up from his upset stomach. The dust his collapse raised was very thick, and as the new dust rose and spread it attenuated the master bedroom’s daylight as decisively as if a cloud had moved over the sun in the window. My father’s professional wig had detached and lay scalp-up in the mixture of dust and stomach material. The stomach material appeared to be mostly gastric blood until I recalled the tomato juice my father had been drinking. He lay face-down, with his bottom high in the air, over the side of the bed frame, which his weight had broken in half. This was how I accounted for the loud cracking sound.

I stood out of the way of the dust and the window’s dusty light, feeling along the line of my jaw and examining my prone father from a distance. I remember that his breathing was regular and wet, and that the dust mixture bubbled somewhat. It was then that it occurred to me that when I’d been supporting the bed’s raised mattress with my chest and face preparatory to its removal from the room, the dihedral triangle I’d imagined the mattress forming with the box spring and my body had not in fact even been a closed figure: the box spring and the floor I had stood on did not constitute a continuous plane.

Then I could hear my mother trying to get the heavy canister vacuum cleaner past the angled Simmons Beauty Rest in the hall, and I went to help her. My father’s legs were stretched out across the clean blue carpet between his side of the frame and my mother’s white dresser. His feet’s boots were at a pigeon-toed angle, and his bottom’s crack all the way down to the anus itself was now visible because the force of his fall had pulled his white slacks down even farther. I stepped carefully between his legs.

‘Excuse me,’ I said.

I was able to help my mother by telling her to detach the vacuum cleaner’s attachments and hand them one at a time to me over the width of the slumped mattress, where I held them. The vacuum cleaner was manufactured by Regina, and its canister, which contained the engine, bag, and evacuating fan, was very heavy. I reassembled the vacuum and held it while my mother made her way back across the mattress, then handed the vacuum cleaner back to her, flattening myself against the wall to let her pass by on her way into the master bedroom.

‘Thanks,’ my mother said as she passed.

I stood there by the slumped mattress for several moments of a silence so complete that I could hear the street’s lawnmowers all the way out in the hall, then heard the sound of my mother pulling out the vacuum cleaner’s retractable cord and plugging it into the same bedside outlet the steel reading lamps were attached to.

I made my way over the angled mattress and quickly down the hall, made a sharp right at the entrance to the kitchen, crossed the foyer to the staircase, and ran up to my room, taking several stairs at a time, hurrying to get some distance between myself and the vacuum cleaner, because the sound of vacuuming has always frightened me in the same irrational way it seemed a bed’s squeak frightened my father.

I ran upstairs and pivoted left at the upstairs landing and went into my room. In my room was my bed. It was narrow, a twin bed, with a headboard of wood and frame and slats of wood. I didn’t know where it had come from, originally. The frame held the narrow box spring and mattress much higher off the floor than my parents’ bed. It was an old-fashioned bed, so high off the floor that you had to put one knee up on the mattress and clamber up into it, or else jump.

That is what I did. For the first time since I had become taller than my parents, I took several running strides in from the doorway, past my shelves’ collection of prisms and lenses and tennis trophies and my scale-model magneto, past my bookcase, the wall’s still-posters from Powell’s Peeping Tom and the closet door and my bedside’s high-intensity standing lamp, and jumped, doing a full swan dive up onto my bed. I landed with my weight on my chest with my arms and legs out from my body on the indigo comforter on my bed, squashing my tie and bending my glasses’ temples slightly. I was trying to make my bed produce a loud squeak, which in the case of my bed I knew was caused by any lateral friction between the wooden slats and the frame’s interior’s shelf-like slat-support.

But in the course of the leap and the dive, my overlong arm hit the heavy iron pole of the high-intensity standing lamp that stood next to the bed. The lamp teetered violently and began to fall over sideways, away from the bed. It fell with a kind of majestic slowness, resembling a felled tree. As the lamp fell, its heavy iron pole struck the brass knob on the door to my closet, shearing the knob off completely. The round knob and half its interior hex bolt fell off and hit my room’s wooden floor with a loud noise and began then to roll around in a remarkable way, the sheared end of the hex bolt stationary and the round knob, rolling on its circumference, circling it in a spherical orbit, describing two perfectly circular motions on two distinct axes, a non-Euclidian figure on a planar surface, i.e., a cycloid on a sphere:

x,v

x,y

The closest conventional analogue I could derive for this figure was a cycloid, L’Hôpital’s solution to Bernoulli’s famous Brachistochrone Problem, the curve traced by a fixed point on the circumference of a circle rolling along a continuous plane. But since here, on the bedroom’s floor, a circle was rolling around what was itself the circumference of a circle, the cycloid’s standard parametric equations were no longer apposite, those equations’ trigonometric expressions here becoming themselves first-order differential equations.

Because of the lack of resistance or friction against the bare floor, the knob rolled this way for a long time as I watched over the edge of the comforter and mattress, holding my glasses in place, completely distracted from the minor-D shriek of the vacuum below. It occurred to me that the movement of the amputated knob perfectly schematized what it would look like for someone to try to turn somersaults with one hand nailed to the floor. This was how I first became interested in the possibilities of annula-tion.

The night after the chilly and sort of awkward joint Interdependence Day picnic for Enfield’s Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, Somer-ville’s Phoenix House, and Dorchester’s grim New Choice juvenile rehab, Ennet House staffer Johnette Foltz took Ken Erdedy and Kate Gompert along with her to this one NA Beginners’ Discussion Meeting where the focus was always marijuana: how every addict at the meeting had gotten in terrible addictive trouble with it right from the first duBois, or else how they’d been strung out on harder drugs and had tried switching to grass to get off the original drugs and but then had gotten in even terribler trouble with grass than they’d been in with the original hard stuff. This was supposedly the only NA meeting in metro Boston explicitly devoted to marijuana. Johnette Foltz said she wanted Erdedy and Gompert to see how completely nonunique and unalone they were in terms of the Substance that had brought them both down.

There were about maybe two dozen beginning recovering addicts there in the anechoic vestry of an upscale church in what Erdedy figured had to be either west Belmont or east Waltham. The chairs were arranged in NA’s traditional huge circle, with no tables to sit at and everybody balancing ashtrays on their knees and accidentally kicking over their cups of coffee. Everybody who raised their hand to share concurred on the insidious ways marijuana had ravaged their bodies, minds, and spirits: marijuana destroys slowly but thoroughly was the consensus. Ken Erdedy’s joggling foot knocked over his coffee not once but twice as the NAs took turns concurring on the hideous psychic fallout they’d all endured both in active marijuana-dependency and then in marijuana-detox: the social isolation, anxious lassitude, and the hyperself-consciousness that then reinforced the withdrawal and anxiety — the increasing emotional abstraction, poverty of affect, and then total emotional catalepsy — the obsessive analyzing, finally the paralytic stasis that results from the obsessive analysis of all possible implications of both getting up from the couch and not getting up from the couch — and then the endless symptomatic gauntlet of Withdrawal from delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol: i.e. pot-detox: the loss of appetite, the mania and insomnia, the chronic fatigue and nightmares, the impotence and cessation of menses and lactation, the circadian arrhythmia, the sudden sauna-type sweats and mental confusion and fine-motor tremors, the particularly nasty excess production of saliva — several beginners still holding institutional drool-cups just under their chins — the generalized anxiety and foreboding and dread, and the shame of feeling like neither M.D.s nor the hard-drug NAs themselves showed much empathy or compassion for the ‘addict’ brought down by what was supposed to be nature’s humblest buzz, the benignest Substance around.

Ken Erdedy noticed that nobody came right out and used the terms melancholy or anhedonia or depression, much less clinical depression; but this worst of symptoms, this logarithm of all suffering, seemed, though unmen-tioned, to hang fog-like just over the room’s heads, to drift between the peristyle columns and over the decorative astrolabes and candles on long prickets and medieval knockoffs and framed Knights of Columbus charters, a gassy plasm so dreaded no beginner could bear to look up and name it. Kate Gompert kept staring at the floor and making a revolver of her forefinger and thumb and shooting herself in the temple and then blowing pretend-cordite off the barrel’s tip until Johnette Foltz whispered to her to knock it off.

As was his custom at meetings, Ken Erdedy said nothing and observed everybody else very closely, cracking his knuckles and joggling his foot. Since an NA ‘Beginner’ is technically anybody with under a year clean, there were varying degrees of denial and distress and general cluelessness in this plush upscale vestry. The meeting had the usual broad demographic cross-section, but the bulk of these grass-ravaged people looked to him urban and tough and busted-up and dressed without any color-sense at all, people you could easily imagine smacking their kid in a supermarket or lurking with a homemade sap in the dark of a downtown alley. Same as AA. Motley disre-spectability was like the room norm, along with glazed eyes and excess spittle. A couple of the beginners still had the milky plastic I.D. bracelets from psych wards they’d forgotten to cut off, or else hadn’t yet gotten up the drive to do it.

Unlike Boston AA, Boston NA has no mid-meeting raffle-break and goes for just an hour. At the close of this Monday Beginners’ Meeting everybody got up and held hands in a circle and recited the NA-Conference-Approved ‘Just For Today,’ then they all recited the Our Father, not exactly in unison. Kate Gompert later swore she distinctly heard the tattered older man beside her say ‘And lead us not into Penn Station’ during the Our Father.

Then, just as in AA, the NA meeting closed with everybody shouting to the air in front of them to Keep Coming Back because It Works.

But then, kind of horrifically, everyone in the room started milling around wildly and hugging each other. It was like somebody’d thrown a switch. There wasn’t even very much conversation. It was just hugging, as far as Erdedy could see. Rampant, indiscriminate hugging, where the point seemed to be to hug as many people as possible regardless of whether you’d ever seen them before in your life. People went from person to person, arms out and leaning in. Big people stooped and short people got up on tiptoe. Jowls ground into other jowls. Both genders hugged both genders. And the male-to-male hugs were straight embraces, hugs minus the vigorous little thumps on the back that Erdedy’d always seen as somehow requisite for male-to-male hugs. Johnette Foltz was almost a blur. She went from person to person. She was racking up serious numbers of hugs. Kate Gompert had her usual lipless expression of morose distaste, but even she gave and got some hugs. But Erdedy — who’d never particularly liked hugging — moved way back from the throng, over up next to the NA-Conference-Approved-Literature table, and stood there by himself with his hands in his pockets, pretending to study the coffee urn with great interest.

But then a tall heavy Afro-American fellow with a gold incisor and perfect vertical cylinder of Afro-American hairstyle peeled away from a sort of group-hug nearby, he’d spotted Erdedy, and the fellow came over and established himself right in front of Erdedy, spreading the arms of his fatigue jacket for a hug, stooping slightly and leaning in toward Erdedy’s personal trunk-region.

Erdedy raised his hands in a benign No Thanks and backed up further so that his bottom was squashed up against the edge of the Conference-Approved-Literature table.

‘Thanks, but I don’t particularly like to hug,’ he said.

The fellow had to sort of pull up out of his pre-hug lean, and stood there awkwardly frozen, with his big arms still out, which Erdedy could see must have been awkward and embarrassing for the fellow. Erdedy found himself trying to calculate just what remote sub-Asian locale would be the maximum possible number of km. away from this exact spot and moment as the fellow just stood there, his arms out and the smile draining from his face.

‘Say what?’ the fellow said.

Erdedy proffered a hand. ‘Ken E., Ennet House, Enfield. How do you do. You are?’

The fellow slowly let his arms down but just looked at Erdedy’s proffered hand. A single styptic blink. ‘Roy Tony,’ he said.

‘Roy, how do you do.’

‘What it is,’ Roy said. The big fellow now had his handshake-hand behind his neck and was pretending to feel the back of his neck, which Erdedy didn’t know was a blatant dis.

‘Well Roy, if I may call you Roy, or Mr. Tony, if you prefer, unless it’s a compound first name, hyphenated, “Roy-Tony” and then a last name, but well with respect to this hugging thing, Roy, it’s nothing personal, rest assured.’

‘Assured?’

Erdedy’s best helpless smile and an apologetic shrug of the GoreTex anorak. ‘I’m afraid I just don’t particularly like to hug. Just not a hugger. Never have been. It was something of a joke among my fam—’

Now the ominous finger-pointing of street-aggression, this Roy fellow pointing first at Erdedy’s chest and then at his own: ‘So man what you say you saying I’m a hugger? You saying you think I go around like to hug?’

Both Erdedy’s hands were now up palms-out and waggling in a like bon-hommic gesture of heading off all possible misunderstanding: ‘No but see the whole point is that I wouldn’t presume to call you either a hugger or a nonhugger because I don’t know you. I only meant to say it’s nothing personal having to do with you as an individual, and I’d be more than happy to shake hands, even one of those intricate multiple-handed ethnic handshakes if you’ll bear with my inexperience with that sort of handshake, but I’m simply uncomfortable with the whole idea of hugging.’

By the time Johnette Foltz could break away and get over to them, the fellow had Erdedy by his anorak’s insulated lapels and was leaning him way back over the edge of the Literature table so that Erdedy’s waterproof lodge boots were off the ground, and the fellow’s face was right up in Erdedy’s face in a show of naked aggression:

‘You think I fucking like to go around hug on folks? You think any of us like this shit? We fucking do what they tell us. They tell us Hugs Not Drugs in here. We done motherfucking surrendered our wills in here,’ Roy said. ‘You little faggot,’ Roy added. He wedged his hand between them to point at himself, which meant he was now holding Erdedy off the ground with just one hand, which fact was not lost on Erdedy’s nervous system. ‘I done had to give four hugs my first night here and then I gone ran in the fucking can and fucking puked. Puked,’ he said. ‘Not comfortable? Who the fuck are you? Don’t even try and tell me I’m coming over feeling comfortable about trying to hug on your James-River-Traders-wearing-Calvin-Klein-aftershave-smelling-goofy-ass motherfucking ass.’

Erdedy observed one of the Afro-American women who was looking on clap her hands and shout ‘Talk about it!’

‘And now you go and disrespect me in front of my whole clean and sober set just when I gone risk sharing my vulnerability and discomfort with you?’

Johnette Foltz was sort of pawing at the back of Roy Tony’s fatigue jacket, shuddering mentally at how the report of an Ennet House resident assaulted at an NA meeting she’d personally brought him to would look written up in the Staff Log.

‘Now,’ Roy said, extracting his free hand and pointing to the vestry floor with a stabbing gesture, ‘now,’ he said, ‘you gone risk vulnerability and discomfort and hug my ass or do I gone fucking rip your head off and shit down your neck?’

Johnette Foltz had hold of the Roy fellow’s coat now with both hands and was trying to pull the fellow off, Keds scrabbling for purchase on the smooth parquet, saying ‘Yo Roy T. man, easy there Dude, Man, Esse, Bro, Posse, Crew, Homes, Jim, Brother, he’s just new is all’; but by this time Erdedy had both arms around the guy’s neck and was hugging him with such vigor Kate Gompert later told Joelle van Dyne it looked like Erdedy was trying to climb him.

‘We’ve lost a couple already,’ Steeply admitted. ‘During the testing. Not just volunteers. Some idiot intern in Data Analysis yielded to temptation and wanted to see what all the fuss was for and got hold of Flatto’s I/O lab’s clearance card and went in and viewed.’

‘From among the many Read-Only copies of your stock of the Entertainment.’

‘No great tragic loss in itself — lose some idiot-child intern. C’est la guerre. The real loss was that his supervisor tried to go in after him and pull him out. Our head of Data Analysis himself.’

‘Hoyne, Henri or pronounce “Henry,” middle initial of F., with the wife, with his adult diabetes he controls.’

‘Did control. Twenty-year man, Hank. Damn good man. He was a friend. He’s in four-point restraints now. Nourishment through a tube. No desire or even basic survival-type will for anything other than more viewing.’

‘Of it.’

‘I tried to visit.’

‘With your sleeveless skirt and different breasts.’

‘I couldn’t even stand to be in the same room, see him like that. Begging for just even a few seconds — a trailer, a snatch of soundtrack, anything. His eyes wobbling around like some drug-addicted newborn. Break your fucking heart. In the next bed, restrained, the idiot intern: this was the sort of undisciplined selfish child you like to talk about, Rémy. But Hank Hoyne was no child. I watched this man put down all sugar and treats when he first got diagnosed. Just put them down and walked away. Not even a whimper or backward glance.’

‘A will of steel.’

‘An American adult of exemplary self-control and discretion.’

‘The samizdat is not to be played crazily about with, so. We too have lost persons. It is serious.’

The legs of the constellation of Perseus were amputated by the earth’s horizon. Perseus, he wore the hat of a jongleur or pantalone. Hercules’ head, this head was square. It was not long to dawn also because at 32° N Pollux and Castor became visible. They were over Marathe’s left shoulder, as if giants were looking over his shoulder, one of Castor’s legs inbent in a feminine manner.

‘But do you ever consider?’ Steeply lit another cigarette.

‘Fantasize, you are meaning.’

‘If it’s that consuming. If it somehow addresses desires that total,’ Steeply said. ‘Not even sure I can imagine what desires that total and utter even are.’ Up and down upon the toes. Turning above the waist only to look back at Marathe. ‘You ever think of what it’d be like, speculate?’

‘Us, we think of what ends the Entertainment may serve. We find its efficacy tempting. You and we are tempted in different ways.’ Marathe could identify no other Southwest U.S.A. constellations except the Big Dipper, which at this latitude appeared attached to the Great Bear to form something resembling the ‘Big Bucket’ or the ‘Great Cradle.’ The chair gave small squeaks when he shifted his weight upon it.

Steeply said ‘Well I can’t say I’ve been tempted in the strictest sense of tempted.’

‘Perhaps we are meaning different things by this.’

‘Frankly, when I think of it I’m as much terrified as I am intrigued. Hank Hoyne is an empty shell. The iron will, the analytic savvy. His love of a fine cigar. All gone. His world’s as if it has collapsed into one small bright point. Inner world. Lost to us. You look in his eyes and there’s nothing you can recognize in them. Poor Miriam.’ Steeply kneaded a bare shoulder. ‘Willis, on the I/O night-shift, came up with a phrase for their eyes. “Empty of intent.” This appeared in a memo.’

Marathe pretended to sniff. ‘The temptation of the passive Reward of terminal p, this all seems complex to me. Terror seems part of the temptation for you. Us of Quebec’s cause, we have never felt this temptation for the Entertainment, or knowing. But we respect its power. Thus, we do not fool crazily about.’

It was not that the sky was lightening so much as that the stars’ light had paled. There became a sullenness about their light. Now, also, strange-looking U.S.A. insects whirred actively past from time to time, moving jag-gedly and making Marathe think of many windblown sparks.

10 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

The following things in the room were blue. The blue checks in the blue-and-black-checked shag carpet. Two of the room’s six institutional-plush chairs, whose legs were steel tubes bent into big ellipses, which wobbled, so that while the chairs couldn’t really be rocked in they could be sort of bobbed in, which Michael Pemulis was doing absently as he waited and scanned a printout of Eschaton’s highly technical core ESCHAX directory, i.e. bobbing in his chair, which produced a kind of rapid rodential squeaking that gave Hal Incandenza the howling fantods as he sat there kitty-corner from Pemulis, also waiting. The printout kept rotating in Pemulis’s hands. Each chair had a 105-watt reading lamp attached to the back on a flexible metal stalk that let the reading lamp curve out from behind and shine right down on whatever magazine the waiting person was looking at, but since the curved lamps induced this unbearable sensation of somebody feverish right there reading over your shoulder, the magazines (some of whose covers involved the color blue) tended to stay unread, and were fanned neatly out on a low ceramic coffeetable. The carpet was a product of something called Antron. Hal could see streaks of lividity where some-body’d vacuumed against the grain.

Though the magazines’ coffeetable was nonblue — a wet-nail-polish red with E.T.A. in a kind of gray escutcheon — two of the unsettlingly attached lamps that kept its magazines unread and neatly fanned were blue, although the two blue lamps were not the lamps attached to the two blue chairs. Dr. Charles Tavis liked to say that you could tell a lot about an administrator by the decor of his waiting room. The Headmaster’s waiting room was part of a little hallway in the Comm.-Ad. lobby’s southwest corner. The premie violets in an asymmetrical sprig in a tennis-ball-shaped vase on the coffee-table were arguably in the blue family. And also the overenhanced blue of the wallpaper’s sky, which the wallpaper scheme was fluffy cumuli arrayed patternlessly against an overenhancedly blue sky, incredibly disorienting wallpaper that was by an unpleasant coincidence also the wallpaper in the Enfield offices of a Dr. Zegarelli, D.D.S., which Hal’s just come back from, after a removal: the left side of his face still feels big and dead, with this persistent sensation that he’s drooling without being able to feel it or stop it. No one’s sure what C.T.’s choice of this wallpaper is supposed to communicate, especially to parents who come with prospective kids in tow to scout out E.T.A., but Hal loathes sky-and-cloud wallpaper because it makes him feel high-altitude and disoriented and sometimes plummeting.

The sills and crosspieces of the waiting room’s two windows have always been dark blue. There was a nautical-blue border of braid around the bill of Michael Pemulis’s jaunty yachting cap. Hal was confident Pemulis would remove the insouciant hat the minute they were called in on what was presumably going to be the carpet.

Also blue: the upper-border slices of sky in the framed informal photos of E.T.A. students that hung on the walls;^[209] the chassis of Alice Moore’s Intel 972 word processor w/ modem but no cartridge-capability; also Ms. Moore’s fingertips and lips. The E.T.A. Headmaster’s receptionist and administrative assistant is known to the players as Lateral Alice Moore. In her youth Lateral Alice Moore had been a helicopter pilot and airborne traffic reporter for a major Boston radio station until a tragic collision with another station’s airborne traffic-report helicopter — plus then the cataclysmic fall to the rush hour’s Jamaica Way six-laner below — had left her with chronic oxygen debt and a neurological condition whereby she was able to move only from side to side. So hence the sobriquet Lateral Alice Moore. An effective time-killer while sitting there waiting for whatever administrator’s summoned you is to have Lateral Alice Moore drum rapidly on her chest and give imitations of her old Boston rush-hour traffic reports in a stuttered helicopterish reporter-voice. Neither Hal, continually checking his chin for drool, nor Pemulis, scanning and bobbing, nor Ann Kittenplan nor Trevor Axford — about whom there was today not even a hint of the color blue — are in the mood for this right now, awaiting what they presume to be some kind of administrative fallout from Sunday’s horrendous Eschaton fiasco. The presumption is based on who’s been summoned here, to wait.

The two different-sized offices that open off the waiting room (through the open and only other door of which the dusky blue Mannington shag of the Comm.-Ad. lobby is visible) belong to Dr. Charles Tavis and to Mrs. Avril Incandenza. Tavis’s office’s outer door is real oak and has his name and degree and title in (nonblue) letters so big that the total I.D. crowds the door’s margins. There’s also an inner door.

Avril, whose feelings about enclosure are well known, has no door on her office. Her office is bigger than C.T.’s, though, and has a seminar table it’s always been obvious he covets. Avril’s office’s blue-and-black-checkered shag is deeper than the waiting room’s shag, so that the border between the two is like a mowed v. unmowed lawn. Avril serves (pro bono) as E.T.A.’s Dean of Academic Affairs and Dean of Females. She’s in there unenclosed right now with pretty much every E.T.A. female under thirteen except Ann Kittenplan, whose tattooed knuckles are bruised and who looks somehow cross-dressed in a dress and (nonblue) barrette. Avril has vividly white hair — as of the last few months before Himself’s felo de se — that looks like it never went through the gray stage (it mostly didn’t) and legs whose taper you can see T. Axford is appraising with the frankness of adolescence as she paces a bit in front of the crowded seminar table, in full if kind of oblique-angled view of the people in the waiting room.^[210] Though it’s not technically in the waiting room with Hal, the plastic fine-tip felt pen Avril taps professionally against her incisors as she paces and considers is: blue.

Administrative diddle-checks have been required at all North American tennis academies since the infamous case of coach R. Bill (‘Touchy’) Phiely at California’s Rolling Hills Academy, whose hair-raising diary and collection of telephotos and tiny panties — discovered only after his disappearance into the Humboldt County hill country with a thirteen-year-old companion — created what might be conservatively termed a climate of concern among the continent’s tennis parents. At the Enfield Tennis Academy, for the last four years, Dr. Dolores Rusk is supposed to hold a kind of distaff community meeting with all female players judged naive and mop-petish enough to be potential diddlees — the youngest of these is Rhode Island’s pint-sized Tina Echt, just seven but a true cannibal off the backhand side — to interface in a discreet but nurturingly empowering group setting, etc., and nip any potential Phielyisms in the bud. Monthly diddle-checks are in Rusk’s contract because they’re in E.T.A.’s O.N.A.N.T.A. accreditation-charter.

Dean of Females Avril M. Incandenza presides over the diddle-check when Dr. Rusk is otherwise engaged, and Rusk is so very rarely legitimately engaged that the fact that it’s the Moms doing diddle-prevention duty today leads Hal to fear that Rusk is maybe in there in the Headmaster’s office getting ready to be in on the upcoming disciplinary scene: C.T. would have to be really upset to want to have Rusk included; Rusk might be there more for C.T. than for any studential psyches.

Axhandle has his eyes closed and is repeating a mnemonic limerick about Brewster’s Angle for the Leith-taught Quadrivial colloquium ‘Reflections on Refraction.’ Michael Pemulis is still scanning a serrated scroll of EndStat-axiomatic Pink₂, which looks to be all math and spiky brackets, and bobbing, ignoring Ann Kittenplan’s murderous looks and tubercular throat-clearings at the squeaking of his bobbing blue chair. You can tell Pemulis really is studying because he keeps turning something upside-down and then rightside-up. Hal declines to share his Rusk-being-in-there-with-Tavis worries with Michael Pemulis, not just because Hal avoids ever mentioning Rusk’s name but also because Pemulis loathes Rusk with a hard and gem-like flame, and though he’d never admit it is already clearly nauseated with worry that he’s going to get the lion’s share of the blame for damage to Lord and Possalthwaite and not only receive corrective on-court discipline but maybe get denied a spot on the trip to Tucson’s WhataBurger, or worse.[211]

Avril is indirect but syntactically crisp with the couple dozen little girls in there, probing. The girls’ outfits involve blue at many levels of hue and intensity in varied combination. Avril Incandenza’s voice is higher on the register than one would expect from a woman so imposingly tall. It is high and sort of airy. Oddly insubstantial, is the E.T.A. consensus. Orin says one reason Avril dislikes music is that whenever she hums along she sounds insane.

The absence of a door to the Moms’s office means you might as well be in there, in terms of being able to hear what’s going on. She has little sense of spatial privacy or boundary, having been so much alone so much when a child. Lateral Alice Moore wears a sort of surreal combination of black Lycra Spandex and filmy green tulle. The portable-stereo headphones she wears — entering what appear to be Response-macros for 80+ received invitations to next week’s WhataBurger Invitational — are powder-blue. Her typing is clearly in synch with something’s backbeat. Her lips and cheek-points are the vague robin’s-egg of cyanosis.

Just why Michael Pemulis hates Dr. Rusk is unclear and seems free-floating; Hal gets a different answer from Pemulis every time. Hal himself feels uncomfortable around Dolores Rusk and avoids her but isn’t aware of any particular reason for being uncomfortable around her. But Pemulis positively detests Rusk. It was Pemulis who’d dickied in at night and hooked a Delco battery up to the inside brass knob of her locked office door, at age fifteen, Rusk’s office door, the first door over in the other little hallway at the lobby’s NE corner, next to the shift-nurses’ office and infirmary, then exiting Rusk’s office by a window and thorny hedge, which Pemulis was extremely fortunate no one but Hal and Schacht and maybe Mario knew he authored the hot knob, because the whole scheme turned quickly disastrous, because it was an elderly Brighton-Irish cleaning lady who got to the hot knob first, at like 0500h., and it turned out Pemulis had seriously under-calculated the brass-conducted Delco voltage involved, and if the cleaning lady hadn’t been wearing yellow rubber cleaning-lady gloves she would have ended up with way worse than the permanent perm and irreversible crossed eyes she regained consciousness with, and the cleaning lady’s Ward Boss was upper Brighton’s infamous F. X. (‘Follow That Ambulance’) Byrne, rapacious personal-injury J.D., and the Academy’s Workman’s Comp. premiums had skyrocketed, and the whole thing was still in litigation.

Avril had eschewed an office door even before the cleaning-lady kert-wang, for simple enclosure-reasons.

Recrossed legs and closer inspection reveal that Trevor Axford’s left sock, though not his right sock, is blue.

Sinistral, his right hand missing digits from a fireworks accident three Interdependence Days past, Axhandle is several cm. shorter than Hal Incan-denza and is a true redheaded person, with copper-colored hair and that moist white freckle-chocked skin that even through two layers of summer Pledge only reddens and peels, plus there’s the matter of the enormous and forever chapped lips; and as a tennis player he is like a less effective version of John Wayne — he does nothing but blast from the baseline, w/o discernible spin. He’s a junior from Short Beach CT and under enormous family pressure to continue the male Axford tradition of attending Yale and is academically so marginal that he knows his only chance to go to Yale is to play tennis for Yale, which would effectively blow any chance at a Show-level future, and is high-ranked but has set his competitive sights on nothing past a Ride-offer to Yale. Though Ingersoll’s informally in Hal’s Big Buddy contingent, he’s technically in Axhandle’s, they’re both aware; and Hal’s a little uncomfortable about his relief that none of the real Eschaton casualties were technically his Buddies.^[212] The only real thing Axford and Hal have in common on the court is a curious habit of refusing to ask for help from other courts when their balls go astray.[213]

Pemulis has finally quit with the bobbing and folded the printout scroll of Pink₂ into a big ragged square and has sidled over to Lateral Alice Moore’s horseshoe-shaped desk and is bantering with her very casually, looking all around him as he banters, trying subtly to feel her out re whether maybe one of these WhataBurger Jr. Invitational invitations stacked cruciform, female athwart male, in Lateral Alice’s IN box concerns anybody with the male initials M.M.P., by any chance. Pemulis and Moore would be less tight if she knew he dickied in at night and used her WATS and modem, though she’s very laid-back and easygoing and not at all like the little framed thing by her name plaque with a scowling woman saying I’VE GOT ONE NERVE LEFT AND YOU’RE GETTING ON IT. The little cartoon is just a standard like office-worker gag. She’d summoned them out of Sixth Hour with the same ancient intercom-and-mike system Troeltsch et al. get to commandeer for Saturdays’ WETA (Troeltsch has had to be prohibited from playing with her chair), and her transmitted voice had not been ungentle. Hal’s face’s left side feels queerly inflated, but then when he runs his right hand over it it’s always regulation-size. Administrative assistants worth their health benefits are synaptically evolved to the point where they can banter, accept compliments on a Spandex-and-tulle ensemble, effortlessly deflect unauthorized info-probes, listen to something bass-intensive on personal-stereo headphones, and word-process effortlessly to the headphones’ backbeat, all simultaneously. Lateral Alice Moore’s bluish fingertips make her painted nails ten little sunsets. Lateral Alice Moore’s desk’s chair’s wheels fit on a track with an electrified third rail, so she can slide from one corner of the horseshoe’s arc to the other — more or less laterally — at the touch of a cerise desktop button. For post-Delco-incident legal reasons, the name-plaque on her reception desk has DANGER: THIRD RAIL instead of the name Lateral Alice Moore.

Hal can hear Avril saying ‘Now. If I speak to all of you very gently about being touched by a tall person in an uncomfortable way, will you know what I mean? Have any of you been kissed or nuzzled or hugged or rubbed or pinched or probed or fondled or in any way touched by a tall person in a way that’s made you uncomfortable?’ Hal can see one of his Moms’s stockinged legs, terminating in a trim ankle and a very white Reebok, extruding from stage-right into the frame of the empty doorway, the Reebok tapping patiently, and one arm crossed over Avril’s chest, and the other arm’s elbow resting on that arm and fluttering in and out of view as Avril taps at her teeth with a blue pen.

‘Gramma pinches my cheek,’ one girl volunteers. She’d actually raised her hand to be called on, her wrist with its touching little (blue) terry wristband. Hal hasn’t seen so many pigtails and button noses and small berry-shaped mouths convened in one indoor place in who knows how long. Very few of the sneakered feet reach all the way to the thick shag in there. Much leg-dangling and absent uncomfortable sneaker-swinging. A couple fingers in nostrils in absent contemplation. Ann Kittenplan, in her blue chair, is coolly appraising the little wash-offable tattoos she applies daily to the knuckles of her hands.

‘Not quite what we’re trying to speak of together right now, Erica,’ from someplace above the tapping foot and in-and-out arm. Hal knows the register and inflections of his mother’s voice so well it almost makes him uncomfortable. His left ankle gives a sick squeak when he flexes it. Cords in his left forearm stand out and subside as he squeezes his tennis ball. The left side of his face feels like something far away that means him harm and is coming gradually closer. He can make out just the whistly fricatives of Charles Tavis’s distant voice from behind his double office doors; it sounds somehow like he’s speaking to more than one person in there. Charles Tavis’s office’s inner door also has the I.D. DR. CHARLES TAVIS on it, and below that his E.T.A. motto about the man who knows his limitations having none.

‘She does it really hard,’ rebuts what must be Erica Siress.

‘I’ve seen her do it,’ what sounds like Jolene Criess confirms.

Another: ‘I hate that.’

‘I hate it when some adult pats my head like I’m a schnauzer.’

‘The next adult that calls me adorable is in for a really unpleasant surprise let me tell you.’

‘I hate it when my hair is tousled or smoothed in any way.’

‘Kittenplan’s tall. Kittenplan gives Indian rub-burns after lights-out.’

Avril gives them verbal space, tries gently to steer the topic closer to true Phielyism; she’s subtle and very good with small children.

‘… that my daddy gives me these small little shoves in the small of the back when he wants me to go into rooms. It’s like he influences me into rooms from behind. This tiny little irritating push, that makes me want to let him have it in the shin.’

‘Mmmmmm-hmm,’ Avril muses.

It’s impossible not to overhear, because things out in the waiting room right now are so comparatively silent except for the tinny hiss of Lateral Alice Moore’s disengaged headphones and the conspiratorial murmur of Michael Pemulis trying to get her to drum on her chest and describe 1-93 South’s Neponset exit-ramp as one very long thin parking lot. Things are so quiet because the anxiety level in Tavis’s waiting room is high.

‘You’re all in for some serious Pukers is my prediction,’ Ann Kittenplan had said to Pemulis as they all first answered the intercom’s summons, which was also about the time that Pemulis started in with the rodential chair-squeaking that made one half of Kittenplan’s face spasm.

One of the tricky and sinister things about corrective discipline at a tennis academy is that punishments can take the form of what might look like straight-out athletic conditioning. Q.v. the drill sergeant telling the recruit to drop and give him fifty, etc. So but this is why Gerhardt Schtitt and his prorectors are way more feared than Ogilvie or Richardson-Levy-O’Byrne-Chawaf or any of the regular academics. It’s not just that Schtitt’s corporal reputation preceded him here. It’s that Schtitt and deLint make out the daily schedules for A.M. drills and P.M. matches and resistance-training and conditioning runs. But especially the A.M. drills. Certain drills are well known to be nothing more than attitude-adjusters, designed to do nothing but dramatically lower life-quality for a few minutes. Too brutal to be assigned on the daily basis that would contribute to genuine aerobic conditioning, drills like the disciplinary version of Tap & Whack^[214] are known to the kids simply as Pukers. Puker-drills are really meant to do nothing but hurt you and make you think long and hard before repeating whatever you did to merit them; but they’re still to all outward appearances exempt from any kind of VIII-Amendment protest or sniveling calls home to parents, insidiously, since they can be described to parents and police^[215] alike as just drills assigned for your overall cardiovascular benefit, with all the actual sadism completely sub rosa.

Kittenplan’s prediction that the upperclassmen are going to wear the whole brown helmet for the Eschaton free-for-all is hopefully rebuttable by Pemulis’s observation that Eschaton’s extracurricular impulse and structure had been firmly in place before any of them’d even enrolled. All Michael Pemulis had done was codify basic principles and impose a sort of matrix of decidable strategy. Maybe helped create a mythology and established, mostly through personal example, a certain level of expectation. All Hal’d done was act as amanuensis on a lousy manual. The I.-Day Combatants had been out there of their own volition. Pemulis and Axford’d gotten Hal to write out most of all this in maximally rhetorical diction, which Pemulis had then embedded in a Pink₂ printout so he could carry it around and study it and have it all nailed down before Tavis tried any boom-lowering. The strategy is to let Pemulis do all the talking but let Hal interject at will, the voice of reason, good-cop/bad. Axford’s been instructed to count the An-tron fibers between his shoes the whole time they’re in there.

Hal has no idea what it might signify that the Headmaster’s summons hasn’t come for almost 48 hours. It might be odd that it hadn’t once occurred to him to see Tavis personally, or to go to HmH and ask the Moms for intercession or info. It’s not like he had the urge but resisted it; it hadn’t even occurred to him.

For somebody who not only lives on the same institutional grounds as his family but also has his training and education and pretty much his whole overall raíson-d’être directly overseen by relatives, Hal devotes an unusually small part of his brain and time ever thinking about people in his family qua family-members. Sometimes when he’ll be chatting with somebody in the endless registration-line for a tournament or at a post-meet dance or something and somebody’ll say something like ‘How’s Avril getting along?’ or ‘I saw Orin kicking the everliving shit out of the ball on an O.N.A.N.F.L. highlights cartridge last week,’ there will be this odd tense moment where Hal’s mind will go utterly blank and his mouth slack and flabby, working soundlessly, as if the names were words on the tip of his tongue. Except for Mario, about whom Hal will talk your ear off, it’s almost like some ponderous creaky machine has to get up and running for Hal even to think about members of his immediate family as standing in relation to himself. It’s a possible reason Hal avoids Dr. Dolores Rusk, who always wants to probe him on issues of space and self-definition and something she keeps calling the ‘Coatlicue Complex.’[216]

Hal’s maternal half-uncle Charles Tavis is a little like the late Himself in that Tavis’s C.V. is a back-and-forth but not indecisive mix of athletics and hard science. A B.A. and doctorate in engineering, an M.B.A. in athletics administration — in his professional youth Tavis had put them together as a civil engineer, his specialty the accommodation of stress through patterned dispersal, i.e. distributing the weight of gargantuan athletic-spectatorial crowds. I.e., he’d say, he’d handled large live audiences; he’d been in his own small way a minor pioneer in polymer-reinforced cement and mobile fulcra. He’d been on design teams for stadia and civic centers and grandstands and micological-looking superdomes. He’d admit up-front that he’d been a far better team-player engineer than out there up-front stage-center in the architectural limelight. He’d apologize profusely when you had no idea what that sentence meant and say maybe the obfuscation had been unconsciously deliberate, out of some kind of embarrassment over his first and last limelighted architectural supervision, up in Ontario, before the rise of O.N.A.N.ite Interdependence, when he’d designed the Toronto Blue Jays’ novel and much-ballyhooed SkyDome ballpark-and-hotel complex. Because Tavis had been the one to take the lion’s share of the heat when it turned out that Blue Jays’ spectators in the stands, many of them innocent children wearing caps and pounding their little fists into the gloves they’d brought with hopes of nothing more exotic than a speared foul ball, that spectators at a distressing number of different points all along both foul-lines could see right into the windows of guests having various and sometimes exotic sex in the hotel bedrooms over the center-field wall. The bulk of the call for Tavis’s rolling head had come, he’d tell you, when the cameraman in charge of the SkyDome’s Instant-Replay-Video Scoreboard, disgruntled or professionally suicidal or both, started training his camera on the bedroom windows and routing the resultant multi-limbed coital images up onto the 75-meter Scoreboard screen, etc. Sometimes in slow motion and with multiple replays, etc. Tavis will admit his reluctance to talk about it, still, after all this time. He’ll confess that his usual former-career-summary is to say just that he’d specialized in athletic venues that could safely and comfortably seat enormous numbers of live spectators, and that the market for his services had bottomed out as more and more events were designed for cartridge-dissemination and private home-viewing, which he’ll point out is not technically untrue so much as just not entirely open and forthcoming.

Lateral Alice Moore is printing out WhataBurger RSVPs. The Intel 972 is cutting-edge, but she clings to a hideous old dot-matrix printer she refuses to replace as long as Dave Harde can keep it going. It’s the same with the intercom system and its antiquated iron stand-up mike that Troeltsch says is an affront to the whole broadcasting profession. Lateral Alice has queer eccentric pockets of intransigence and Ludditism, due possibly to her helicopter-crash and neurologic deficits. The printer’s needly sound fills the waiting room. Hal finds he can be confident of his face’s symmetry and saliva only when he sits there with his right hand over his left cheek. Each line of Alice’s printed response sounds like some sort of supposedly unrippa-ble fabric getting ripped, over and over, a dental and life-denying sound.

For Hal, the general deal with his maternal uncle is that Tavis is terribly shy around people and tries to hide it by being very open and expansive and wordy and bluff, and that it’s excruciating to be around. Mario’s way of looking at it is that Tavis is very open and expansive and wordy, but so clearly uses these qualities as a kind of protective shield that it betrays a frightened vulnerability almost impossible not to feel for. Either way, the unsettling thing about Charles Tavis is that he’s possibly the openest man of all time. Orin and Marlon Bain’s view was always that C.T. was less like a person than like a sort of cross-section of a person. Even the Moms Hal could remember relating anecdotes about how as a teenager, when she’d taken the child C.T. or been around him at Québecois functions or gatherings involving other kids, the child C.T. had been too self-conscious and awkward to join right in with any group of the kids clustered around, talking or plotting or whatever, and so Avril said she’d watch him just kind of drift from cluster to cluster and lurk around creepily on the fringe, listening, but that he’d always say, loudly, in some lull in the group’s conversation, something like ‘I’m afraid I’m far too self-conscious really to join in here, so I’m just going to lurk creepily at the fringe and listen, if that’s all right, just so you know,’ and so on.

But so the point is that Tavis is an odd and delicate specimen, both ineffectual and in certain ways fearsome as a Headmaster, and being a relative guarantees no special predictive insight or quarter, unless certain maternal connections are exploited, the thought of doing which literally does not occur to Hal. This odd blankness about his family might be one way to manage a life where domestic and vocational authorities sort of bleed into each other. Hal squeezes his tennis ball like a madman, sitting there in the needly printout-noise, right palm against his left cheek and elbow hiding his mouth, wanting very much to go first to the Pump Room and then to brush vigorously with his portable collapsible Oral-B. A quick chew of Kodiak is out of the question for several reasons.

The only other time this year that Hal was officially summoned to the Headmaster’s waiting room had been in late August, right before Convocation and during Orientation period, when Y.D.A.U.’s new kids were coming in and wandering around clueless and terrified, etc., and Tavis had wanted Hal to take temporary charge of a nine-year-old kid coming in from somewhere called Philo IL, who was allegedly blind, the kid, and apparently had cranium-issues, from having originally been one of the infantile natives of Ticonderoga NNY evacuated too late, and had several eyes in various stages of evolutionary development in his head but was legally blind, but still an extremely solid player, which is all kind of a long tale in itself, given that his skull was apparently the consistency of a Chesapeake crabshell but the head itself so huge it made Booboo look microcephalic, and the kid apparently had on-court use of only one hand because the other had to pull around beside him a kind of rolling IV-stand appliance with a halo-shaped metal brace welded to it at head-height, to encircle and support his head; but anyway Tex Watson and Thorp had broken C.T. down over the kid’s admission and tuition-waver, and C.T, now figured the kid would need to say the least some extra help getting oriented (literally), and he wanted Hal to be the one to take him in hand (again literally). It turned out a couple days later that the kid had some kind of either family or cerebro-spinal-fluid crisis at home in rural IL and wasn’t matriculating now till the Spring term. But back in August Hal had sat in the very chair Trevor Axford is now nodding off in, very late in the day, like dusk, having had an informal exhibition match with a visiting Latvian Satellite pro go an encouraging three sets that P.M. so that he’d missed Mrs. C.’s stuffed peppers at supper, his stomach making those where’s-the-food noises from around the transverse colon, alone in the blue room, waiting, the chair bobbing reflexively, with Lateral Alice Moore gone home to her long apartment with rooms only 2 m. wide in Newton and an opaque plastic dust-thing wrapped tight over her Intel processor and intercom-console and the little red danger-light on her DANGER: THIRD RAIL plaque unlit, and the only lights besides the weak dusk outside were the hot 105W of his chairback’s creepy blue-shaded magazine-lamp, plus the multiple lamps on in Charles Tavis’s office (Tavis has a phobic thing about overhead lighting) as Tavis was doing a late-day Intake interview on impossibly tiny little Tina Echt, who just matriculated this fall at age seven. His doors were open because it was a brutal August and F. D. V. Harde had somehow rigged Lateral Alice’s air-conditioner vent in the waiting room so it really put out. Tavis’s office’s outer door opened out while the inner door opened in, which gave his little inter-door vestibule kind of a jaw-like quality, when exposed.

August Y.D.A.U. had been when Hal’s chronic left ankle had been almost the worst it’s ever been, after an erumpent but grueling summer tour of getting to at least the Quarters of just about everything, mostly on hard asphalt,^[217] and he could feel his pulse in the vessels in the raw ligaments of the ankle as he sat flipping the shiny pages of a new World Tennis and watching the little ad-cards fall out and flutter; but he also couldn’t help exploiting the open-jawed view of a substantial section of Charles Tavis at his office desk, looking as usual oddly foreshortened and small and with his hands together on the massive desktop across from a partial-profile view of a girl who looked like she couldn’t be much more than five or six, preparing to receive Intake papers as she listened to Tavis. There’d been no Echt parents or guardians anywhere in view. Some kids just get dropped off. Sometimes the parents’ cars barely even stop, just slow down, throw gravel as they accelerate away. Tavis’s desk drawers have squeaky casters. Jim Struck’s folks’ Lincoln hadn’t even much slowed. Struck had been helped to his feet and taken immediately to the locker room to shower the gravel out of his hair. Hal had been in charge of his Orientation, too, when Struck transferred, booted out of Palmer Academy after his pet tarantula (named Simone — another long story) escaped and wouldn’t even have dreamed of biting the Headmaster’s wife if she hadn’t screamed and passed out and fallen right on it, Struck explained as Hal helped pick up suitcases tumbled all over the drive.

Like many gifted bureaucrats, Hal’s mother’s adoptive brother Charles Tavis is physically small in a way that seems less endocrine than perspectival. His smallness resembles the smallness of something that’s farther away from you than it wants to be, plus is receding.^[218] This weird appearance of recessive drift, together with the compulsive hand-movements that followed his quitting smoking some years back, helped contribute to the quality of perpetual frenzy about the man, a kind of locational panic that it’s easy to see explains not only Tavis’s compulsive energy — he and Avril, pretty much the Dynamic Duo of compulsion, between them, sleep, in their second-floor rooms in the Headmaster’s House — separate rooms — tend to sleep, between them, about as much as any one normal insomniac — but maybe also contributes to the pathological openness of his manner, the way he thinks out loud about thinking out loud, a manner Ortho Stice can imitate so eerily that he’s been prohibited by the male 18’s from doing his Tavis-impression in front of the younger players, for fear that the littler kids will find it impossible to take the real Tavis seriously at the times he needs to be taken seriously.

As for the older kids, Stice can make them all double up now merely by shielding his eyes with his hand and assuming a horizon-scan expression whenever Tavis heaves into view, seeming to recede even as he bears down.

C.T. as Headmaster always has a number of introductory questions for matriculants, and Hal, now, in November, can’t remember which one of these Tavis opened with with Echt, but he remembers seeing the little girl’s sucker-stick sweep the air and a plastic Mr. Bouncety-Bounce^[219] no-pierce earring swing wildly as she shook her head. Hal’d marvelled at her size. How high could somebody this little be ranked, even regionally, in 12’s?

And then yes the sumptuous squeak of Tavis’s big seagrass chair coming back forward as his elbows took his weight and he laced his fingers together out across meters of polymer-reinforced shale desktop, custom-designed. The Headmaster’s smile as he leaned back, though hidden from Hal because of the shadow of the office’s enormous StairBlaster,^[220] was nevertheless audible because of the thing with Charles Tavis’s teeth, about which maybe the less said the better. Looking discreetly in, Hal had felt an involuntary rush of affection for C.T. His maternal uncle’s hair was straight and very precisely combed over, and his little mustache was never quite symmetrical. One eye was also set at a slightly different angle than the other, so that besides holding his hand up to scan Stice would also cock his head slightly to the side whenever C.T. came near. Hal’s involuntary grin is lopsided and only half-felt, now, remembering. The Axhandle’s sitting there slumped, with his fist to his chin, a posture that he thinks makes him look meditative but that really makes him look in utero, and Kittenplan is chewing at her knuckles’ tattoos, which is what she does instead of washing them off.

Then Ortho Stice had entered the hot waiting room, shirt wet and crew cut matted from the courts and toting his Wilsons, and made right for the AC-vent’s downdraft outside Tavis’s little vestibule. Slice’s clothes were comped by Fila and when he played any sort of match he wore all black, and at E.T.A. and on the tour was known as The Darkness. He had a crew cut and the beginnings of jowls. He and Hal exchanged the very slight sorts of nods people use when they like each other past all need for politeness. They had similar games, although most of Stice’s touch was at the net. Stice raised one hand to his eyes and cocked his head slightly in the direction of the office’s lamplight.

‘The little guy going to be a long time in there?’

‘You have to ask?’

Tavis was saying ‘What actually we do for you here is to break you down in very carefully selected ways, take you apart as a little girl and put you back together again as a tennis player who can take the court against any little girl in North America without fear of limitation. With a perspective unmarred by the eyelashes of whatever pockets you brought here. A little girl now who can regard the court as a mirror whose reflection holds no illusions or fear for you.’

‘Now the thing with the skull,’ Stice said. Hal had watched gooseflesh rise on Stice’s arms and legs as he stood under the cold air and faced up and breathed, hugging his gear to his chest.

‘One possible way of couching it is to choose to say that we will take apart your skull very gently and reconstruct a skull for you that will have a highly developed bump of clarity and a slight concave dent where the fear-instinct used to be. I’m doing my best to cast all this in terms the you you are right now can be comfortable with, Tina. Though I need to tell you I feel uncomfortable adjusting a presentation toward or down toward anyone in any way, since I’m terribly vain, both as a man and an educator, about my reputation for candor,’ Tavis said. The audible smile. ‘It is one of my limitations.’

Stice withdrew without even having to say goodbye to Hal. They were at complete ease with one another. It had been a bit different the year before, when Hal was still in Boys’ 16’s. Hal heard Stice say something to somebody out in the lobby. Part of C.T.’s impression of distance just past the eye’s focal length was the fact that the two sides of his face didn’t quite go together. It wasn’t as drastic as a stroke-victim’s face or a deformity; the subtlety of it was part of it, the essential vagueness about himself that Tavis fought by sort of peeling his skull back and exposing his brain to you without any sort of warning or invitation; it was part of the man’s preoccupied frenzy.

Between Ortho Stice’s exit and the Moms’s entry Hal had been flexing the ankle and watching the swelling shift slightly under the multiple socks. He stood and put his weight on the ankle experimentally a couple times and then sat back down and flexed it, watching the swelling very intently. The way he knew suddenly that he was going to go down and get high in secret in the Pump Room before showering was that it hadn’t occurred to him to ask The Darkness about making some sort of arrangements to eat together, since Stice had missed supper too. His viscera were putting out the sound of one of those teakettles that doesn’t have a whistle and so just rumbles as it boils. A competitive athlete cannot skip meals without terrific metabolic distress.

After a little while Avril Incandenza, E.T.A.’s Dean of Academic Affairs, had lowered her head under the waiting room’s jamb and come in, looking fresh and totally untouched by the heat. She had one of the Orientation packets in its customary red-and-gray binder.

The Moms always had this way of establishing herself in the exact center of any room she was in, so that from any angle she was somehow in the line of all sight. It was part of her, and so to that extent dear to Hal, but it was noticeable and kind of unsettling. His brother Orin, during a late-night round of Family Trivia, had once described Avril as The Black Hole of Human Attention. Hal had been pacing, rising up on the toes of the left foot, trying to gauge the exact level of physical discomfort he was feeling. That’s when she’d come in. Hal and the Moms always greeted each other kind of extravagantly. When Avril entered a room, any sort of pacing reduced to orbiting, and Hal’s pacing became vaguely circular around the waiting room’s perimeter as Avril rested her tailbone on the receptionist’s desk and crossed her ankles and produced her cigarette case. Her manner always became very casual and almost sort of male when she and Hal were alone in a room.

She watched him walk. ‘The ankle?’

He hated himself for exaggerating the limp even slightly. ‘Tender. Sore at the very worst. More like tender.’

‘No, now, now no need to cry,’’ C.T. was exclaiming as he knelt at the side of the chair from which little legs dangled and were spasming around. ‘I didn’t mean literally break, as in break open your bead, Tina. Please let me acknowledge that this is totally my fault my dear for presenting what we’ll be up to here in just exactly the wrong sort of light.’

Avril had casually produced a 100-mm. rodney from the flat brass case and tamped it on an unlined knuckle. Hal produced no lighter. Neither of them had looked toward Tavis’s office’s maw. Avril’s smock-type dress was blue cotton, with a kind of scalloped white doily around the shoulders and white stockings and painfully white Reebok cross-trainers.

‘I am horrified that I’ve made you cry like this.’ Tavis’s voice had assumed that stressed character of issuing from the end of a long corridor. ‘Just please know that a totally unthreatening lap is available if you want a lap, is all I can think of to say.’

Avril always smoked with her smoking-arm up and elbow resting in the crook of the other arm. She would frequently hold a rodney just this same way without lighting it or even putting it in her mouth. She permitted herself to smoke only in her E.T.A. office and HmH study and one or two other venues outfitted with air-filtration equipment. Her posture, that night, with her coccyx against something and looking down the length of her legs, was awfully close to the way Himself used to stand around. She indicated C.T.’s door with her head.

‘I gather he’s been in there a while.’

Hal despised even the very slight suggestion of whine that came in: ‘I’ve been waiting here coming up on an hour.’ And that he liked it a little that she looked pained for him as her tiny eyebrows (unplucked, just naturally tiny and arched) went up.

‘You’ve had nothing to eat, then, yet?’

‘I was summoned.’’

Tavis’s voice in there: Til invite you right here and now to sit in my lap and let me make such soothing sounds as There There There.’

‘Want my Mommy and Daddy.’

Avril said, ‘That’s the old turn making those sounds then, and not the air conditioner?’ with that smile that was also a kind of wince.

‘Couldn’t even start to describe the sounds coming from down there, like that whistleless kettle Himself used to leave on when —’

An apple appeared from a deep pocket in her smock. ‘Happen to have a spare Granny Smith here, to tack body to soul while we wait.’

He smiled tiredly at the big green apple. ‘Moms, that’s your apple. That’s all you’re going to eat between 12 and 23, I happen to know.’

Avril made a distended gesture. ‘Stuffed. Huge lunch with a set of parents not three hours ago. I’ve been staggering around since.’ Looking at the apple like she had no idea where it’d even come from. Til probably pitch this out.’

‘You will not.’

‘Please,’ rising from the desk’s edge without seeming to use muscles, apple held out like something distasteful, cigarette down at her side where it would be putting a hole in the smock if lit. ‘You’d be doing us both a favor.’

‘This drives me bats. You know this drives me bats.’

Orin and Hal’s term for this routine is Politeness Roulette. This Moms-thing that makes you hate yourself for telling her the truth about any kind of problem because of what the consequences will be for her. It’s like to report any sort of need or problem is to mug her. Orin and Hal had this bit, during Family Trivia sometimes: ‘Please, I’m not using this oxygen anyway.’ ‘What, this old limb? Take it. In the way all the time. Take it.’ ‘But it’s a gorgeous bowel movement, Mario — the living room rug needed something, I didn’t know what til right this very moment.’ The special fantodish chill of feeling both complicit and obliged. Hal despised the way he always reacted, taking the apple, pretending to pretend his reluctance to eat her supper was a pretense. Orin believed she did it all on purpose, which was way too easy. He said she went around with her feelings out in front of her with an arm around the feelings’ windpipe and a Clock 9 mm. to the feelings’ temple like a terrorist with a hostage, daring you to shoot.

The Moms held the red binder out to Hal without moving. ‘Have you seen Alice’s new packets?’ The apple was good-sour but perfumy from the pocket of the Moms’s smock, and it stimulated a torrent of saliva. The binder had different little informal and action photos from the waiting-room walls, and offprints of clippings, and three rings for the packet of guidelines and Honor-Code pledges, all done up by Moore in a Gothic ital.

Hal looked up from the binder, indicating C.T.’s office with his head. ‘You’re taking the girl around yourself?’

‘We’re encouragingly short-staffed. Thierry and Donni won their qualifying round at Hartford, so they’re staying over.’ She leaned way forward and looked in at C.T. so he could see she was out here. She smiled.

Hal followed her look. ‘The girl’s name’s Tina something and she’ll come up to about your knee.’

‘Echt,’ Avril said, looking at something on a printout.

Hal looked at her while he chewed. ‘You don’t like her already?’

‘Tina Echt. Pawtucket. Father apparently some sort of unleavened baker, mother a public relations person for the Red Sox A.A.A. baseball there.’

Hal had to wipe his chin as he smiled. ‘Triple-A. Not A.A.A.’

Avril was leaning forward at the waist with the binder to her breast the way females hold flat things, still trying to catch the Headmaster’s eye.

Hal said ‘Troeltsch finally has some competition in the repulsive-last-name department.’

‘Lord she is a small one isn’t she.’

‘I can’t see her being more than maybe five.’

‘Oh golly let’s see: age seven, high I.Q., somewhat impoverished-looking M.M.P.I., played out of Providence Racquet and Bath in East Providence. Ranked thirty-first in Eastern 12’s as of June.’

‘She can’t be much taller than her damn stick out there, when she plays. Schtitt’s going to keep her here what, twelve years?’

‘The girl’s father has been calling about admission for her for over two years, Charles said.’

‘He was doing that thing about taking skulls apart and she yelled bloody murder.’

Avril’s laugh’s onset was high-pitched and alarming and distinctive, so now at least C.T. would for sure know the Moms was out here waiting and would wind things up and maybe get to Hal so Hal could go get high in secret. ‘Well good for her,’ Avril said.

The orbit took him around Lateral Alice Moore’s desk in a kind of thick ellipse. Every time his left foot came down he either dipped down or raised up briefly to tip-toe, flexing the ankle. ‘Ten years here and she’ll lose her mind. If she starts at seven she’ll either be ready for the Show at fourteen or by fourteen she’ll start getting that burned-out look that makes you want to wave your hand in front of her face.’

There was the sound of Tavis’s squeaky right Nunn Bush pacing faster, which meant real conclusion. ‘I’m going to predict it’s probably hard to see yourself as a great athlete at this stage, Tina, not being able to see over the net yet, but possibly even harder to see yourself as providing entertainment, engaging people’s attention. As a high-velocity object people can project themselves onto, forgetting their own limitations in the face of the nearly limitless potential someone as young as yourself represents.’

The apple generated tremendous amounts of saliva. ‘He’ll put her in the Show before menses, there’ll be another enormous fuss and high-rental cartridges of a girl no larger than her racquet beating up on hairy Slavic lesbians, and then by fourteen she’ll be like old coal in the bottom of a backyard grill.’ Some old military joke about apples kept running through. Eat the Apple, Fuck the Core. Hal couldn’t remember what it was supposed to signify.

The Moms was snapping her fingers silently and working her forehead. ‘There’s some term for coals reduced to residue after all day in a grill. I’m trying to think.’

Hal hates this. ‘Clinkers,’ he said instantly. ‘From klinker low German and klinckaerd old Dutch, to sound, ring, nominated to substantive around 1769: a hard mass formed by the fusion of the earthy impurities of like coal, iron ore, limestone.’ He hated it that she could even dream he’d be taken in by the aphasiac furrowing and finger-snapping, and then that he’s always so pleased to play along. Is it showing off if you hate it?

‘Clinker.’

‘A grill wouldn’t have clinkers. Charcoal’s refined to burn right down to dust. Clinkers are sort of metallic, I think. See for example the ring-dash-sound etymology.’

‘I like to suspect this is why so many of our older players like to project me into this carnival-barker persona with tiny balance sheets revolving in my eyes, that I’m up-front with every incoming addition to our family that this is where the resources come from for professional tennis, and for the North American junior development system for gifted children who want to scale the heights to professionalism or to a competitive college career, and so ultimately for an Academy like this one’s considerable operating expenses, and for scholarships like the partial one we’re so happy to be able to offer your parents for you.’

‘So then perhaps you’d care to join us for dinner. We’ll also have Ms. Echt if she can stay up that long.’

The core made a very-muffled-cymbal sound in the bottom of Lateral Alice’s wastebasket. ‘I can’t get out of dawns. Wayne and I are supposed to play Slobodan^[221] and Hartigan at some corporate-spectacle thing at Au-burndale right after lunch.’

‘Have you had Barry speak to Gerhardt about the ankle not getting better?’

‘The clay’ll be good to it. Schtitt knows all about the ankle.’

‘Well best of British luck to you both.’ Avril’s purse looked more like soft luggage than like a purse. ‘May I lend you the key to the kitchen, then.’

It’s always the Moms’s left shoulder Hal looks over, whenever he orbits, and his plans emerged between Avril’s invitations to accept some sort of politeness-act. ‘The Darkness and I were going to blast down the hill and grab something if and when I ever get out of here.’

‘Oh.’

Then he wondered with dread what Stice might have said to her on her way in, re supper. ‘Maybe Pemulis too, I think Pemulis said.’

‘Well do not, under any circumstances, enjoy yourself.’

Echt and Tavis were both standing, now, in there. Their handshake looked, for the first split-second he looked, like C.T. was jacking off and the little girl was going Sieg Heil. Hal thought he was maybe starting to lose his mind. Even the meat of the Granny Smith smelled like perfume.

Three months later, earlier today, before being again summoned, at the dentist’s, the dentist’s office had had a weird sharp clean sweet smell about it, the olfactory equivalent of fluorescent light. Hal had felt the cold stab in the gum and then the slow radial freeze, his face ballooning to become one of the frozen cumuli against the aftershave-blue of the dental wallpaper’s sky. Zegarelli D.D.S. had dry dark green eyes that bulged above his mint-blue mask, as in like olives where eyes should be, as he leaned in to proceed, his dental overhead light’s corona giving him one of those malperspectived medieval halos that seem to stand on end. Even masked, Zegarelli’s breath is infamous — E.T.A.s forced for the first time by their E.T.A. Group Plan to recline below Zegarelli are counselled on how to respire, to inhale when Zegarelli inhales and exhale right back out with him, to avoid doubling the amount of suffering Hal’s already gone through, just today.

Charles Tavis is not a buffoon. The thing that’s keeping things so tensely quiet out here amid all this waiting-room blue is that there are historically at least two Charles Tavises, the three older boys know. The openly cross-sectional and free-associating and arms-waving-on-the-perspectival-horizon dithering hand-wringing Total-Worry persona is really Tavis’s version of social composure, his way of trying to get along with you. But just ask Michael Pemulis, whose sneakers have been on Tavis’s carpet so often they’ve left an unvacuumable impression in the checked Antron: when Tavis loses his composure, when the integrity or smooth function of the Academy or his unquestioned place at the E.T.A. tiller is God forbid threatened, Hal’s openly adjustable uncle becomes a different man, one not to be fucked with. It’s not necessarily pejorative to compare a cornered bureaucrat to a cornered rat. The danger-sign to watch out for is if Tavis suddenly gets very quiet and very still. Because then he seems, perspectivally, to grow. He seems, sitting there, to rush in at you, dopplering in at a whisper. Almost looming over you from across the huge desk. If shit meets administrative fan, kids coming out of his mandible-doored office come out pale and rubbing their eyes, not from tears but from this depth-perspective skewing that C.T. suddenly effects, when there’s shit.

Another alert is when Lateral Alice Moore gets formally buzzed to bring you and the others in, instead of the office doors ever opening from inside, and when she gets up and edges over to show you in like you’re some sort of hat-holding salesman, without once meeting your eye, as if there’s shame. One big family.

The diddle-check seems like it’s degenerated into the girls all getting very excited and exchanging data on what kinds of animals members of their own biologic families either imitate or physically resemble, and Avril’s out of sight and silent and apparently letting them go with it for a while and vent stress. Hal keeps checking for jaw-drool with the back of his hand. Pemulis, in a Cyrillic-lettered T-shirt, takes off the hat and looks around himself and makes reflexive tie-straightening movements, taking one last look at his lines on the printout while Axford stands there needing three tries to work the outside door’s knob. Ann Kittenplan, on the other hand, wears an expression of almost regal calm, and precedes them through the inner door like someone stepping down off a dais.

And it also seems somehow sinister that she’s apparently been in here all this time, this Clenette person, one of the nine-month temps from down the hill, pretty-eyed and so black she’s got a bluish cast, with hair ironed straight and then pinned up and the standard E.T.A.-custodial teal-blue zip-upable jumpsuit, emptying Tavis’s personal brass wastebaskets into her big cart with its gray canvas sides. The way she stares at a point just to the side of Hal’s own stare as she and her cart wait at C.T.’s inner door for Hal and the others to be ushered sideways through by Lateral Alice Moore. The cart, like poor Otis Lord’s own game-master’s cart, has a crazy wheel, and clatters a bit even buried in shag, trying to maneuver around Moore as she reverses back along the vestibule’s wall. Neither Schtitt nor deLint is in here, but from the hiss of Pemulis’s inhale Hal can tell that Dr. Dolores Rusk is in the room even before he takes his eyes from a C.T. who’s sitting pulsing with swollen proximity in his seagrass swivel-chair and almost done coolly bending a giant paper clip into a sort of cardioid or else sloppy circle: Tavis’s window-lit shadow now reaches all the way past the StairBlaster to the red-and-gray-fabric ottoman along the east wall, in which sits sure enough Rusk, her hose laddered and face betraying nothing; and then next to her is poor old Otis P. Lord, the Hitachi monitor still over his head like the sallet of some grotesque high-tech knight, slumped and with his sneakers pointing at each other in the blue and black shag, hands in his lap, two crude eye-holes cut into the black plastic casing of the monitor’s base, Lord not meeting Pemulis’s eye, and wicked hanging shards of glass from the screen he fell through pointing — some nearly touching, even — his slim neck and throat, so he has to hold his head very still, despite the heavings of his shallow chest, with the day-shift E.T.A. nurse standing behind him and inclined over the back of the sofa to hold the monitor very carefully in place, the incline producing cleavage which Hal would gladly choose to be the sort of person not to note. Lord’s eyes move to Hal and blink dolefully through the holes, and he can be heard sniffing moistly in there, complexly muffled; and Pemulis is just finishing moving his feet precisely into their familiar impressions in the office carpet when C.T., seeming direly to rise from his chair without getting up, quietly asks the room’s last occupant — the scrubbed young button-nosed urologist in an O.N.A.N.T.A. blazer, severely underdue at E.T.A., seated back in the shadow of the open inner door in the room’s southeast corner, so he’s hidden right behind them from the start and there’s the opportunity for this stagy incriminating-type whirl-and-kertwang-face from Axford and Hal as they hear Charles Tavis addressing the urine expert behind them, asking him very quietly please to close both doors.