Infinite jest

11 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

Apparently some higher-up had sent Mary Esther Thode out on her little yellow Vespa with the order for their match; she’d pulled up alongside Stice and Wayne just as they cleared the Hammond golf course, Hal a good half km. behind them with galumphers Kornspan and Kahn. Schtitt was inscrutable about the whole thing. The match wasn’t like a ladder-challenge; Stice and Hal were in different age-divisions this year. The match was more like maybe an exhibition, and by the second set, as people got done with the weight room and showers, it was attended like one. The match. Helen Steeply of Moment, possessed of a certain thuggish allure but hardly the pericardium-piercer that Orin had made her sound like, to Hal, sat through the whole thing, accompanied for the first set by Aubrey deLint before Thierry Poutrincourt stole his spot on the bleacher. It was the first high-caliber junior tennis she’d ever seen, she said, the massive journalist. They played on #6, the best of the east Show Courts. Also the scene of some of the recent Eschaton’s worst carnage. It was a conditioning-heavy day, a very light schedule of matches. Bags of smoke burped steadily up from Schtitt’s crow’s nest high overhead, and sometimes you could hear the weatherman’s pointer tapping absently on the transom’s iron. The only other thing nearby was down on #10, a challenge in Girls’ 14’s, two baseliners sending parabolas back and forth: ponytails, an air of baseline attrition, the ball’s high heavy arc that of a loogy spat for distance. Shaw and Axford were also way out on =0=23, warming up. No one paid them or the 14’s much mind. The bleachers behind the Show Court filled steadily up. Schtitt had Mario film the whole first set from above, leaning way out over the transom’s railing with Watson braced and gripping his vest from behind, Mario’s police lock protruding and casting a weird needly shadow slanted northeast of Court 9’s net.

‘This is the first real match I’ve seen, after hearing so much about the junior tour,’ Helen Steeply told deLint, trying to cross her legs on a cramped bleacher a few tiers from the top. Aubrey deLint’s smile was notoriously bad, his face seeming to break into crescents and shards, wholly without cheer. It was almost more like a grimace. Orders that deLint keep the mammoth soft-profiler in direct sight at all times were explicit and emphatic. Helen Steeply had a notebook, and deLint was filling in both players’ names on performance charts Schtitt won’t ever let anyone look at.

The P.M. was moving fast from a chilly noon cloud-cover into blue autumn glory, but in the first set it was still very cold, the sun still pale and seeming to flutter as if poorly wired. Hal and Stice didn’t have to stretch and barely warmed up at all, after the run. They’d changed clothes and were both expressionless. Stice was in all-black, Hal in E.T.A. sweats with his left shoe’s upper bulging distended around his AirStirrup brace.

A born net-man, Ortho Stice played with a kind of rigid, liquid grace, like a panther in a back-brace. He was shorter than Hal but better-built and with quicker feet. A southpaw with factory-painted W’s on his Wilson Pro Staff 5.8 si’s.

Hal was left-handed too, which complicated strategy and percentages hideously, deLint told the journalist beside him.

The Darkness’s service motion was in the McEnroe-Esconja tradition, legs splayed, feet parallel, a figure off an Egyptian frieze, side so severely to the net he’s almost facing away. Both arms out straight and stiff on the serve’s downswing. Hal bobbed on his feet’s balls a little in the ad court, waiting. Stice started his service-motion motion in little segments — it looks a little like bad animation — then grimaced, tossed, pivoted netward and served it with a hard flat spang way out to Hal’s forehand, pulling Hal wide. The finish of Stice’s pivot lets his momentum carry him naturally up to net, following the serve. Hal lunged for the serve and chipped a little forehand return down the line and scrambled right to get back into court. The return was lucky, a feeble chip that just cleared the net’s tape, so shallow that Stice had to half-volley it at the service line, still moving in, his backhand two-handed and clumsy for half-volleys; he had to sort of scoop it and hit up soft so it wouldn’t float out deep. Axiom: the man who has to hit up from the net is going to get passed. And Stice’s half-volley landed in the ad court squishy and slow and sat up for Hal, who was waiting for it. Hal’s stick was back for the forehand, waiting, and there was a moment of total mentation as the ball hung there. Statistically, Hal was book to pass a left-handed volleyer cross-court off a ball this ripe, though he also always loved a good humiliating topspin lob, and Stice’s fractional chance at saving the point was to guess what Hal would do — Stice couldn’t crowd the net because Hal would put it up over him; he stayed a couple stick-lengths off the net, leaning for a cross. Everything seemed to hang distended in air now so clear it seemed washed, after the clouds. The bleachers’ people could feel Hal feel Stice letting the point go, inside, figuring it lost, knowing he could only guess and stab, hoping. Little hope of Hal fucking up: Hal Incandenza does not fuck up passes off floater half-volleys. Hal’s forehand’s wind-up was nicely disguised, prepped for either lob or pass. When he hit it so hard his forearm’s musculature stood starkly out it was a pass but not cross-court; he went inside-out on it, a flat forehand as hard as he could from the baseline’s center back toward Stice’s deuce-sideline. Stice had finally guessed lob at the start of the stroke and had half-turned to sprint back for where it would land, and the inside-out pass wrong-footed him; he could do no more than stand there flat-footed and watching as the fresh ball landed a meter fair to get Hal back to deuce in the fifth game. There was applause off thirty hands for the point as a whole, which was faultless and on Hal’s part imaginative, anti-book. One of very few total inspired points from Incandenza, deLint’s chart would show. Neither player’s face moved as a couple people shouted for Hal. The basic ten-level R.A.S.U.^[265] from the Universal Bleacher Co. sat right behind the court. At the start it was mostly staff and the A’s who were running alongside when Thode brought Stice and Hal the directive to play. But the stands gradually filled as word got down to the locker rooms that The Darkness was playing 18’s A-2 dead-even in the first set of something Schtitt had actually dispatched a scooter to order. The bleachers’ E.T.A.s hunched forward with hands warmed in the crease between hamstrings and calves, or else gloved and layered and stretched out with their heads and bottoms and heels on three different levels, watching both sky and play. The lozenges of shadow from the court’s mesh fences elongated as the sun wheeled southwest to west. Several sets of legs and sneakers hung swinging from the transom above. Mario allowed himself several reaction-shots from staff and partisans in the bleachers. Aubrey deLint spent the set with the punter’s ca-thected profiler, who allegedly came to see Hal only about Orin but whom Charles Tavis won’t let see Hal yet, even chaperoned, Tavis’s reasons for the reticence too detailed for Helen Steeply to understand, probably, but she was watching from the Show-bleachers’ top row, poised over a notebook, wearing a fuchsia ski cap with a rooster-comb top instead of a pompom top, blowing into her fist, her weight making the bleacher below her bow and inclining deLint oddly toward her. For the spectators not perched on the transom overhead, the players looked waffle-cut by the chain-link fencing. The green windscreens that wrecked spectation were used only in the spring in the weeks right after the Lung’s disassembly. DeLint hadn’t stopped talking into the big lady’s ear.

All the E.T.A. players loved the Show Courts 6–9 because they loved to be watched, and also hated the Show Courts because the transom’s crow’s-nested shadow covered the north halves of the courts around noon and all through the P.M. wheeled around gradually east like some giant hooded shadowed moving presence, brooding. Sometimes just the sight of Schtitt’s little head’s shadow could make a younger kid on the Show Courts clutch and freeze. By Hal and Stice’s seventh game, the sky was cloudless, and the transom’s monolithic shadow, black as ink, gave everyone watching the fantods as it elongated along the nets, completely obscuring Slice when he followed a serve in. Another advantage of the Lung was that it afforded no overhead view, which was one more reason why staff waited as long as possible before its erection. There was no indication Hal even saw it, the shadow, hunched and waiting for Stice.

The Darkness splayed out stiff on the deuce side of the center line, ratcheting slowly into his service motion. He overhit the first serve long and Hal angled it softly off-court, moving two steps in for the second ball. Stice hit his second serve as hard as he could again and netted it, and pursed his thick lips a little as he walked into the net’s shadow to retrieve the ball, and Hal jogged over to the fence behind the next court to get the ball he’d angled over. DeLint was putting a pejorative hieroglyphic in a box on his chart marked STICE.

At just this moment, @1200 meters east and downhill and one level below ground, Ennet House live-in Staff Don Gately lay deeply asleep in his Lone-Rangerish sleeping mask, his snores rattling the deinsulated pipes along his little room’s ceiling.

Four-odd clicks to the northwest in the men’s room of the Armenian Foundation Library, right near the onion-domed Watertown Arsenal, Poor Tony Krause hunched forward in a stall in his ghastly suspenders and purloined cap, his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands, getting a whole new perspective on time and the various passages and personae of time.

M. M. Pemulis and J. G. Struck, wet-haired after their P.M. runs, had blarneyed their way past the library-attendant at the B.U. School of Pharmacy 2.8 clicks down Commonwealth on Comm. and Cook St. and were seated at a table in Reference, Pemulis’s yachting cap pushed way back to accommodate his rising eyebrows, licking his finger to turn pages.

H. Steeply’s green sedan with its neuralgiac full-front Nunhagen ad on the side sat in an Authorized Guest parking spot in the E.T.A. lot.

Between appointments,^[266] in an office whose west windows yielded no view of the match, Charles Tavis had his head mashed up against the upholstered seat-rail of his sofa, his arm under the gray-and-red ruffle and sweeping back and forth for the bathroom scale he keeps under there.

Avril Incandenza’s whereabouts on the grounds were throughout this interval unknown.

At just this moment M.S.T., Orin Incandenza was once again embracing a certain ‘Swiss’ hand-model before a wall-width window in a rented suite halfway up a different tall hotel (from before) in Phoenix AZ. The win-dowlight was fiery with heat. Way below, tiny cars’ roofs glared so bright with reflected light their colors were obscured. Pedestrians hunched and sprinted between different areas of shade and refrigeration. The cityscape’s glass and metal twinkled but seemed to sag — the whole vista looked somehow stunned. The cool air through the room’s vent whispered. They’d put down their glasses of ice and come together upright and embraced. The embrace was not like a hug. There was no talking — the only sound was the vent and their breath. Orin’s linen knee probed the deltoid fork of the hand-model’s parted legs. He let the ‘Swiss’ woman grind against the muscular knee of his good leg. They got so close no light shone between them, and ground together. Her lids fluttered; his closed; their breath became somehow coded. Again the concentrated tactile languor of the sexual mode. Again they stripped each other to the waist and she, in that same kind of jitterbug jape they didn’t have the breath to laugh at, she hopped up at him and forked her legs the same way over his shoulders and arched back until his arm stopped her fall and he supported her like that, the left hand horned with old callus at the small of her satiny back, and bore her.

Sometimes it’s hard to believe the sun’s the same sun over all different parts of the planet. The NNE sun was at this same moment the color of hollandaise and gave off no heat. Between points, both Hal and Slice switched their sticks to their right hands and clamped their left hands tight under their arms to keep from losing sensation in the chill. Stice was double-faulting more than his average because he was trying to get enough on his second serve to follow it credibly to net. DeLint estimated he was charting Stice at one double-fault per 1.3 games, and his a./d.f. ratio^[267] was an undistinguished.6, but he, deLint, told Helen Steeply of Moment, spread way out next to him on the third row from the top and using Gregg shorthand, deLint told this Ms. Steeply that Stice was nevertheless wise to crank the second serve and eat the occasional double-fault. Stice wound up to serve so stiff, his motion so sprocketed and serial, that the journalist told deLint Stice looked to her as if he’d learned to serve by studying still photos of the motion’s different stages, no offense intended. There was none of real highspeed motion’s liquid flow until the very end, when Stice pivoted toward the net and seemed to sort of fall out into the court, his tennis racquet whirling behind his back and snapping upward to impact the yellow ball hanging at just the height of his maximum reach, and there was a solid pock as this Stice cracked it flat into Orin’s brother’s body, handcuffing Hal at such speeds the ball’s movement presented only as afterimage, the creamy retinal trail of something too fast to track. Hal’s awkward return had too much slice, and floated, and Stice hurtled forward to volley it chest-high, blocking it acute into open court for a clean winner. There was mild applause. DeLint invited Helen Steeply to note that The Darkness really won that point on the serve itself. Hal Incandenza walked to the fence to retrieve the ball, impassive, wiping his nose against his sweatshirt’s sleeve; ad-in. Hal was up 5–4 in the first and had saved three ads off Stice’s fifth service game, two off double-faults; but deLint still maintained Stice was wise.

‘Hal’s got to the point in the last year here where a kid’s only real chance is to totally press, attack at all times, whale the serve, haul ass to the net, assume the aggressor role.’

‘Does Herr Schtitt wear eye makeup?’ Helen Steeply asked him. ‘I was noticing.’

‘You stay back against this Hal kid, you try to out-think him and move him around, he’ll yank you back and forth and chew you up and spit you out and step on the remains. We’ve spent years getting him to this point. Nobody stays back and out-controls Incandenza anymore.’

Pretending to flip to a fresh page, Helen Steeply dropped her pen, which fell into the bleachers’ struts and supports and clattered as only something dropped into a system of metal bleachers can clatter. The prolonged noise made Stice take some extra bounces before he served. He bounced the ball several times, leaning forward, lined up splayed and violently sideways. He went into his odd segmented windup; Helen Steeply produced another pen from the pocket of her fiberfill parka; Stice cracked it flat down the center, aiming for an ace on the service lines’ T. It went by Hal unplayable and literally too close to call. There are no linesmen for internal E.T.A. matches. Hal looked down the line at where the thing hit and skidded, pausing before indicating his call, the hand to his cheek indicating deliberation. He shrugged and shook his head and laid a hand out flat in the air before him to signify to Slice he was calling the serve good. This meant game Stice. The Darkness was walking toward the net, kneading his neck, looking at where Hal was still standing.

‘We can go on and play two,’ Stice said. ‘Didn’t see it neither.’

Hal was coming in closer to Stice because he was going to the net-post for his towel. ‘Not your job to see it.’ He looked unhappy and tried to smile. ‘You hit it too hard to see, you deserve the point.’

Stice shrugged and nodded, chewing. ‘You take the next gimme then.’ He sliced two balls soft so they ended their roll down near the opposite baseline, where Hal could use them to serve. The Darkness still made huge man-dibular chewing faces on-court even though he hadn’t been allowed to chew gum in play since he accidentally inhaled gum and had to be Heimliched by his opponent in the semis of last spring’s Easter Bowl.

‘Ortho’s saying how the next debatable call goes immediately to Hal; they don’t take two,’ deLint said, darkening in half-squares on the two charts.

‘Take two?’

‘Play a let, babe. Do it over. Two serves: one point.’ Aubrey deLint was a lightly pockmarked man with thick yellow hair in an anchorman’s helmety style and a hypertensive flush, and eyes, oval and close-set and lightless, that seemed like a second set of nostrils in his face. ‘Do a whole lot of sports at Moment do you?’

‘So they’re being sporting,’ Steeply said. ‘Generous, fair.’

‘We inculcate that as a priority here,’ deLint said, gesturing vaguely at the space around them, head bent to his charts.

‘They seem like friends.’

‘The angle here for Moment might be the good-friends-off-the-court-and-remorseless-pitiless-foes-on-court angle.’

‘I mean they seem like friends even playing,’ Helen Steeply said, watching Hal dry off his leather grip with a white towel as Stice jumped up and down in place back at his deuce corner, one hand in his armpit.

DeLint’s laugh sounded to Steeply’s keen ear like the laugh of a much older and less fit man, the mucoidal fist-at-chest laugh of a lap-blanketed old man in a lawn chair on his gravel backyard in Scottsdale AZ, hearing his son say his wife claimed no longer to know who he was. ‘Don’t kid yourself, babe,’ de Lint got out. The Vaught twins on the bleacher below looked up and around and pretended to shush him, the left mouth grinning, deLint with that bad cold-eyed shard of a smile back at them as Hal Incandenza bounced the ball three times and went into his own service motion.

Several little boys were strung busily out along the sides of a small utility tunnel twenty-six meters below the Show Courts.

Steeply’s face looked as if the journalist were trying to think of pithy images for a motion as unexceptional and fluid as Hal Incandenza’s serve. At the start a violinist maybe, standing alert with his sleek head cocked and racket up in front and the hand with the ball at the racket’s throat like a bow. The down-together-up-together of the downswing and toss could be a child making angels in the snow, cheeks rosy and eyes at the sky. But Hal’s face was pale and thoroughly unchildlike, his gaze somehow extending only half a meter in front of him. He looked nothing like the punter. The service motion’s middle might be a man at a precipice, falling forward, giving in sweetly to his own weight, and the serve’s terminus and impact a hammering man, the driven nail just within range at the top of his tiptoed reach. But all these were only parts, and made the motion seem segmented, when the smaller crew-cutted jowly boy was the one with the stuttered motion, the man of parts. Steeply had played tennis only a couple times, with his wife, and had felt ungainly and simian out there. The punter’s discourses on the game had been lengthy but not much use. It was unlikely that any one game figured much in the Entertainment.

Hal ïncandenza’s first serve was a tactically aggressive shot but not immediately identifiable as such. Stice wanted to serve so hard he could set himself up to put the ball away on the next shot, up at net. Hal’s serve seemed to set in motion a much more involved mechanism, one that took several exchanges to reveal itself as aggressive. His first serve hadn’t Stice’s pace, but it had depth, plus a topspin Hal achieved with an arched back and faint brushing action over the back of the ball that made the serve curve visibly in the air, egg-shaped with spin, to land deep in the box and hop up high, so that Stice couldn’t do more than send back a deep backhand chip from shoulder-height, and then couldn’t come in behind a return that’d been robbed of all pace. Stice moved to the baseline’s center as the chip floated back to Hal. Hal’s pivot moved him right so he could take it on the forehand,^[268] another looper dripping with top, right back in the same corner he’d served to, so that Stice had to stop and sprint back the same way he’d come. Stice drove this backhand hard down the line to Hal’s forehand, a blazing thing that made the audience inhale, but as the samizdat’sdirector’s other son glided a few strides left Steeply could see that he now had a whole open court to hit cross-court into, Stice having hit so hard he’d backpedalled a bit off the shot and was now scrambling to get back out of the deuce corner, arid Hal hit the flat textbook drive cross-court into green lined space, hard but not flamboyantly so, and the diagonal of the ball kept it travelling out wide after it hit Stice’s ad sideline, carrying it away from the boy in black’s outstretched racquet, and for a second it looked as if Stice at a dead run might get his strings on the ball, but the ball stayed tantalizingly just out of reach, still travelling at a severe cross-court diagonal, and it passed Slice’s racquet half a meter past its rim, and Slice’s momentum carried him almost halfway into the next court. Stice slowed to a jog to go retrieve the ball. Hal stood slightly hipshot on the ad side, waiting for Stice to get back and let him serve again. DeLint, whose peripheral vision’s acuity and disguise was an E.T.A. legend, observed the big journalist chew her nib for a second and then put down nothing more than the Gregg ideogram for pretty, shaking her fuchsia cap.

‘Wasn’t that pretty,’ he said blandly.

Steeply rooted for a hankie. ‘Not exactly.’

‘Hal’s in essence a torturer, if you want his essence as a player, instead of a straight-out killer like Stice or the Canadian Wayne,’ deLint said. ‘This is why you don’t stay back or play safe against Hal. This way of the ball seeming just in reach, to keep you trying, running. He yanks you around. Always two or three shots ahead. He won that point on the deep forehand after the serve — the second he had Stice wrong-footed you could see the angle open up. Though the serve set the whole thing up in advance, and without the risk of much pace on it. The kid doesn’t need pace, we’ve helped him find.’

‘When might I get a chance to talk to him?’

‘Incandenza took a lot of bringing along. He didn’t used to quite have the complete game to be able to do this. Slice the court up into sections and chinks, then all of a sudden you see light through one of the chinks and you see he’s been setting up the angle since the start of the point. It makes you think of chess.’

The journalist blew her red nose. ‘ “Chess on the run.”

‘Nice term.’

Hal went into his service motion to the ad court.

‘Do the students play chess here?’

A mirthless chuckle. ‘No time.’

‘Do you play chess?’

Stice hit a backhand winner off Hal’s second serve; mild applause.

‘I don’t have time to play anything,’ deLint said, filling in a square.

You could tell by the sound that the other boy’s racquet was strung tighter than Hal’s.

‘When do I get to sit down with Hal directly?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think you do.’

The journalist’s rapid head-movement reconfigured the flesh of her neck. ‘Pardon me?’

‘It’s not my decision. My guess is you don’t. Dr. Tavis didn’t already tell you?’

T really couldn’t tell what he was telling me.’

‘We’ve never had a kid here interviewed. The Founder let you guys on the grounds, versus Tavis this is an exception your even getting in.’

‘I’m here for background only, for your alumnus, the punter.’

DeLint was making his lips look like he was whistling even though no whistling-sound was emerging. ‘We’ve never let somebody do any kind of interview on a kid here while he’s still in training and inculcation.’

‘Does the student have some sort of say in who he talks to and why? What if the boy wants to chat with me about his brother’s transition from tennis to football?’

DeLint kept his concentration on the match and the chart in a way that was supposed to let you know you had very little of his attention. ‘Talk to Tavis about it.’

‘I was in there for over two hours.’

‘You pick up how to do questions with him after a while. Tavis you have to back into a Yes-No corner where you can finally say I need a Yes or a No. It takes about twenty minutes if you’re sharp. This is your whole business, getting answers out of people. The answer’s not for me to officially say, but I’m guessing a No. The Boston press guys come around after a big event, they get match results and physical stats and hometowns and nothing more.’

‘Moment is a national magazine for and about exceptional people, not some sportswriter with a cigar and a deadline.’

‘It’s a command-decision, babe. I’m not in command. I know they teach us to teach that this place is about seeing instead of being seen.’

‘I’m here only for the human-interest perspective of a talented boy on his talented brother’s bold transition to a major sport where he’s shown himself to be even more talented. One exceptional brother on another. Hal is not the profile’s focus.’

‘Get Tavis in the right corner and he’ll tell you about seeing and being seen. These kids, the best of them are here to learn to see. Schtitt’s thing is self-transcendence through pain. These kids —’ gesturing at Stice running madly up for a drop-volley that stopped rolling well inside the service line; mild applause — ‘they’re here to get lost in something bigger than them. To have it stay the way it was when they started, the game as something bigger, at first. Then they show talent, start winning, become big fish in their ponds out there in their hometowns, stop being able to get lost inside the game and see. Fucks with a junior’s head, talent. They pay top dollar to come here and go back to being little fish and to get savaged and feel small and see and develop. To forget themselves as objects of attention for a few years and see what they can do when the eyes are off them. They didn’t come here to get read about as some soft-news item or background. Babe.’

DeLint read Steeply’s expression as some kind of tic. The tiniest tuft of nostril-hair protruded from one of her nostrils, which deLint found repellent. She said, ‘Were you ever written about, as a player?’

DeLint smiled coolly at his charts. ‘Never had the sort of ranking or promise this issue’d even come up for me.’

‘But some of these do. Hal’s brother did.’

DeLint felt along his lip’s outline with his pencil, sniffed. ‘Orin was OK. Orin was essentially a one-trick pony as a player. And between you and me and the fence he was kind of a head-case. His game left here on the downswing. Now his little brother’s got a future in tennis if he wants. And Ortho. Wayne for sure. A couple of the girls — Kent, Caryn and Sharyn here,’ indicating the Vaught-apparition below them. ‘The really gifted ones, the ones that make it out of here still on the upswing, if they get to the Show — ‘

‘Meaning professional you mean.’

‘In the Show they’ll get all they want of being made into statues to be looked at and poked at and discussed, and then some. For now they’re here to get to be the ones who look and see and forget getting looked at, for now.’

‘But even you call it “The Show.” They’ll be entertainers.’

‘You bet your ass they will be.’

‘So audiences will be the whole point. Why not also prepare them for the stresses of entertaining an audience, get them used to being seen?’

The two boys were at the near net-post, Stice blowing his nose into a towel. DeLint made kind of a show of putting his clipboard down. ‘Assume wrongly for a second that I can speak for the Enfield Academy. I say you do not get it. The point here for the best kids is to inculcate their sense that it’s never about being seen. It’s never. If they can get that inculcated, the Show won’t fuck them up, Schtitt thinks. If they can forget everything but the game when all of you out there outside the fence see only them and want only them and the game’s incidental to you, for you it’s about entertainment and personality, it’s about the statue, but if they can get inculcated right they’ll never be slaves to the statue, they’ll never blow their brains out after winning an event when they win, or dive out a third-story window when they start to stop getting poked at or profiled, when their blossom starts to fade. Whether or not you mean to, babe, you chew them up, it’s what you do.’

‘We chew statues?’

‘Whether you mean to or no. You, Moment, World Tennis, Self, Inter-Lace, the audiences. The crowds in Italy fucking literally. It’s the nature of the game. It’s the machine they’re all dying to throw themselves into. They don’t know the machine. But we do. Gerhardt’s teaching them to see the ball out of a place inside that can’t be chewed. It takes time and total focus. The man’s a fucking genius. Profile Schtitt, if you want to profile somebody.’

‘And I’m not going to be allowed even to ask the students what it looks like, this inside chew-proof place. It’s a secret place.’

Hal mishit a second serve and it flew off his frame and way down to where the girls were sending each other squeaks and lobs, and Stice had now broken him to go up 6–5, and the murmurs in the bleachers were like a courtroom at an unpleasant revelation. DeLint rounded his lips and made a kind of bovine sound in Ortho Stice’s direction. Hal chipped his balls out along the baseline and made some small adjustments in his cross-hatched strings as he walked around for the side-change. A couple of the nastier kids applauded Hal’s mishit a little.

‘Get sardonic with me all you want. I already said it’s not my command-decision. I wouldn’t get sardonic with Tavis, though.’

‘But if it were. Your command.’

‘Lady, if it was me you’d be pressing your nose between the bars of the gate down there is as far in as you’d get. You’re coming into a little slice of space and/or time that’s been carved out to protect talented kids from exactly the kind of activities you guys come in here to do. Why Orin, anyway? The kid appears four times a game, never gets hit, doesn’t even wear pads. A one-trick pony. Why not John Wayne? A more dramatic story, geopolitics, privation, exile, drama. A better player than Hal even. A more complete game. Aimed like a fucking missile at the Show, maybe the Top Five if he doesn’t fuck up or burn down. Wayne’s your ideal food-group. Which is why we’ll keep you off him as long as he’s here.’

The soft-profiler looked around at the scalps and knees in the stands, the bags of gear and a couple incongruous cans of furniture polish. ‘Carved out of what, though, this place?’

From the Desk of Helen Steeply

Contributing Editor

Moment Magazine

13473 Blasted Expanse Blvd.

Tucson, AZ, 857048787/2

Mr. Marlon K. Bain Saprogenic Greetings, Inc. BPL-Waltham Bldg. 1214 Totten Pond Road Waltham, MA, 021549872/4. November Y.D.A.U.

Dear Mr. Bain:

In Phoenix on other business, it has been my good fortune to meet your adolescent friend, Mr. Orin J. Incandenza, and to have become intrigued with the possibilities of a profile of the Incandenza family and its accomplishments in not only sports but wide-ranging topics such as independent film circa metropolitan Boston, past and present.

I am writing to ask for your cooperation in contacting you with questions which you could answer in writing, as I am informed by Mr. Orin Incandenza you dislike to meet people outside your home and office.

I am hoping to hear from you in response to this request at your earliest convenience, Etc. etc. etc.

Saprogenic Greetings*

WHEN YOU CARE ENOUGH TO LET A PROFESSIONAL SAY IT FOR YOU

*a proud member of the ACME Family of Gags ‘N Notions, Pre-Packaged Emotions, Jokes and Surprises and Wacky Disguises

Ms. Helen Steepley And So On November Y.D.A.U.

Dear Ms. Steepley: Fire away.

V.D., MK Bain

Saprogenic Greetings/ACME

From the Desk of Helen Steeply

Contributing Editor

Moment Magazine

13473 Blasted Expanse Blvd.

Tucson, AZ, 857048787/2

Mr. MK Bain Saprogenic Greetings Inc. BPL-Waltham Bldg. 1214 Totten Pond Road Waltham, MA, 021549872/4. November Y.D.A.U.

Dear Mr. Bain:

Q, Q, Q (Q, Q[Q], Q, Q, Q), Q, Q (Q), Q, Q.[269]

Carved out of sedimentary shale and ferrous granite and generic morphic crud — at more or less the same time the hilltop’s bulge was shaved off and rolled and impacted level for tennis — are E.T.A.’s abundant tunnels. There are access tunnels and hallway tunnels, with rooms and labs and Pump Room’s Lung-nexus off both sides, utility tunnels and storage tunnels and little blunt off-tunnels connecting tunnels to other tunnels. Maybe about sixteen different tunnels in all, in a shape that’s more generally ovoid than anything else.

11/11, 1625h., LaMont Chu, Josh Gopnik, Audern Tallat-Kelpsa, Philip Traub, Tim (‘Sleepy T.P.’) Peterson, Carl Whale, Kieran McKenna — the bulk of the ambulatory sub-14 male Eschatonites — plus ten-year-old Kent Blott — are 26 meters directly below the Hal/Darkness match’s Show Court with Glad Handle-Tie^[270] trashbags and B.P. low-diffusion compact mercuric flashlights. Plus Chu has a clipboard with a pen attached to its clamp with twine. The sounds of competitive sneaker-movement and spectatorial bleacher-squeaks on the surface, travelling down through meters of compacted crud and polymerized cement tunnel-ceiling w/ parget-layer, sound rather like the stealthy dry scuttle of rodents, vermin. And this heightens the excitement that’s part of why they’re really down here.

One part of the reason they’re down here is that small U.S. boys seem to have this fetish for getting down in the enclosed fundaments underneath things — tunnels, caves, ventilator-shafts, the horrific areas beneath wooden porches — rather the way older U.S. boys like great perspectival heights and spectacular views encompassing huge swaths of territory, this latter fetish accounting for why E.T.A.’s hilltop site is one of its trump-cards in the recruiting war with Port Washington and other Eastern-seaboard academies.

Another part is a semi-punitive shit detail in which certain players — judged to have been involved in the recent Eschaton nonstrategic-combat debacle, but who are uninjured^[271] and not in the much severer hot water that the Big Buddies on the scene are in — have been punitively remanded below ground in P.M. shifts on what’s supposed to constitute an unpleasant chore, to scout out the tunnelled route the TesTar Ail-Weather Inflatable Structures Corp.’s professional guys will have to take as they haul out from the Lung-Storage Room the fiberglass struts and crosspieces and dendri-urethane folds that compose the Lung, for erection of the Lung, when the E.T.A. administration finally decides that the late-fall weather has gone beyond character-building and become an impediment to development and morale. This will be soon. Because the prorectors live in rooms off the larger tunnels and F. D. V. Harde’s Physical Plant and Maintenance guys have their offices and supplies down here, and because Dr. James Incandenza’s old optics and editing facilities are down here off one of the main tunnels and get used for Leith/Ogilvie classes in entertainment production and for optical science tutorials etc., and because a couple of the secondary and off-tunnels are used for temporary storage by departing seniors who can’t tote eight or more years’ worth of accumulated stuff in one post-graduate load — especially if they jet off to some novitiate-pro Satellite circuit for the summer, because that means air travel, two bags plus gear, max — some of the tunnels become badly littered in the warm season with trash-type material. And sometimes there’s bulky-possession-type overflow from the little curved storage tunnels off the prorectors’ hallway. Smaller kids are perfect for recons into low narrow tunnels partly blocked with dross, and even though it’s no secret around E.T.A. that the smaller boys spend a fair amount of time down in the tunnels anyway, a retributive aspect is lent to this recon-detail by making the kids take down Handle-Tie trashbags to clear away littered exam papers and lab-handouts, calculator-batteries and banana peels and Kodiak smokeless-tobacco tins and spirals of synthetic-gut racquet-string, and Maintenance guys’ hideous cigar-butts — Sleepy T.P. finds two bright Trojan wrappers just off the prorectors’ hallway-tunnel, and then a couple meters farther along the floor the vermiform gleam of an actual condom, and there’s some high-register debate about whether it’s a used condom or not, and poor old Kent Blott is finally put in charge of picking it up and putting it in a trashbag, just in case it’s a used condom — and empty boxes of complimentary corporate gear, and full boxes of faggy or poorly-absorbent gear nobody wants, and Habitant can-wrappers, and senior trunks and dorm-sized fridgelettes, etc.; and also to move whatever boxes they can heft, clear them out of the TesTar guys’ access-route into the Lung-Storage and Pump Rooms; and LaMont Chu is supposed to note the location of any boxes or objects too bulky for them to move out of the way, and beefy custodial guys will be dispatched to handle them as they see fit.

This is why a fair number of the smaller E.T.A. males don’t see Stice take a set off Hal Incandenza and nearly beat him, is that they were remanded down here by Neil Hartigan right after post-conditioning showers.

As noted already, they don’t much mind it, being down here, now in one of the child-size-diametered off-tunnels between the prorectors’ hallway and the Lung-Storage Room. The Eschatonites are down here quite a lot anyway. In fact the sub-14 E.T.A.s historically have a kind of Tunnel Club. Like many small boys’ clubs, the Tunnel Club’s unifying raison d’etre is kind of vague. Tunnel Club activities mostly involve congregating informally in the better-lit main tunnels and hanging out and catching each other in lies about their lives and careers before E.T.A., and recapitulating the most recent Eschaton (usually only about five a term); and the Club’s only formal activity is sitting around with a yellowed copy of Robert’s Rules endlessly refining and amending the rules for who can and can’t join the Tunnel Club. A true boy-type club, the Tunnel Club’s least vague raison d’etre has to do with exclusion. The vital No-Girls exclusion is the only ironclad part of the Tunnel Club’s charter.^[272] With the exception of Kent Blott, every boy down here on this detail is an Eschatonite and a member of the Tunnel Club. Kent Blott, ineligible for Eschaton because he’s a humanities-type kid and hasn’t even taken quadrivial Algebra yet, and excluded from the Club under every incarnation of the eligibility requirements thus far, is down here solely because he was heard to maintain at lunch that he was in the north part of the main tunnel between the Comm.-Ad. locker rooms and the subterranean laundry room this A.M., short-cutting back to his room in West House after drills and a sauna, and claimed to have espied — scuttling out of his mercuric light toward one of the secondary tunnels to Subdorms C and D and the East Courts and this same general tunnel-area they’re now in — to have sighted what was either a rat or, he said, what looked even more like a Concavitated feral hamster. So the Es-chatonites are also enthusiastic to be down here for potential rodent-recon, checking out Blott’s claim, and they’ve brought what’s either a very nervous or very excited Blott down with them, so they can trace the possible routes Blott said he saw the rodent maybe take, filling their Glad Handle-Ties and noting heavy items along the way, and also so they can immediately encircle and discipline Kent Blott if it turns out he was yanking people’s chains. Plus they make Blott be the one to take full trashbags and tie their plastic handles together and drag them back to where the expedition started — the entrance to the large smooth main tunnel by the boys’ sauna — since none of them enjoys dragging full trashbags solo through dark tunnels with the rodential squeaking of match play and spectation far above. Chu holds a penlight in his teeth and writes heavy stuff down. They’ve filled several bags and gotten the lighter shit stacked off back enough to create a narrow route almost all the way to the Pump Room, around which Room hangs a strange sweet stale burny smell that none of them can place. The applause as Hal Incandenza barely takes the first set above sounds down here like faraway rain. The off-tunnel’s dark as a pocket, but warm and dry, and there’s surprisingly little dust. Ducts and coaxials running along the low ceiling make Whale and Tallat-Kelpsa have to crouch as they walk Point, clearing boxes and trying unsuccessfully to move fridgelettes back out of the way. There are several pockets of small but heavy dorm-size Maytag fridgelettes, the kind of thing no graduate takes with him, panelled in dark wood-grain plastic, some of them old models with three-prong plugs instead of chargers. Some of the empty fridgelettes have been indifferently scrubbed out and have their doors partway open and smell stale. Most of Chu’s inventory for beefy-adult removal are either fridgelettes or locked trunks full of what sound like magazines and eight-year accumulations of pennies. The muffled rodential squeak of sneakers far overhead excites the Tunnel Club boys and puts them on edge. Philip Traub keeps making little squeaky noises and secretly tickling the back of people’s necks, causing enormous excitement and much stopping and starting and tightly-enclosed whirling around, until Kieran McKenna captures Traub tickling Josh Gopnik in the bright beam of his P.B. light and Gopnik punches Traub in the radial nerve, and Traub clutches his arm and weeps and says he’s quitting and going topside — Traub’s the youngest kid here except for Blott and is a probationary second-string launcher in most Eschatons — and they have to stop and let Chu note and mark two discarded fridgelettes while Peterson and Gopnik try to distract and amuse Traub into staying and not retreating back up to Nwangi and making a high-pitched stink.

Discarded fridgelettes, empty boxes, immovable and complexly-address-labelled trunks, used athletic tape and Ace bandages, the occasional empty Visine bottle (which Blott stashes in his sweatshirt-pouch, for Mike Pemulis’s next contest), Optics I & II lab reports, broken ball machines and stray tennis balls too dead even for the repressurization machine, broken or discarded TP cartridges of stroke-analysis filmings or worn-out entertainments, an anomalous set of parfait glasses, fruit peels and AminoPal energy-bar-wrappers that the Club itself had left down here after meetings, discarded curls of grip and tensile string, several incongruous barrettes, several old broadcast televisions some older kids used to like to keep around to watch the static, and, along the seam of wall and floor, brittle limb-shaped husks of exfoliated Pledge, expanses of arm and leg already half-decayed into fragrant dust — this comprising the bulk of the crud down here, and the kids don’t much mind scanning and inventorying and bagging it, because their minds are diverted by something else very exciting, a kind of possible raison d’etre for the Club itself, unless Blott had been tweaking their Units, in which case look out Blott, is the consensus.

Gopnik to a sniffling Traub, while Peterson shines his flashlight on the clipboard for Chu: ‘Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere that Mary went, the lights became erratic.’

Carl Whale pretends to be immensely fat and moves along the wall with a blimpish splay-legged waddle.

Peterson to Traub, while Gopnik holds the light: ‘Eighteen-year-old top-ranked John Wayne / Had sex with Herr Schtitt on a train / They had sex again/And again and again/And again and again and again,’ which the slightly older kids find more entertaining than Traub does.

Kent Blott asks why a wispy-dicked blubberer like Phil gets to be in the Tunnel Club while his own applications get turned down, and Tallat-Kelpsa cuts him short by doing something to him in the dark that makes Blott shriek.

It’s utterly dark except for the dime-sized discs of their low-diffusion B.P.s, because they’ve left the tunnels’ strings of bare overhead bulbs off, because Gopnik, who’s originally from Brooklyn and knows from rodents, says only a complete booger-eating moron would do rat-reconnaissance in the light, and it seems reasonable to assume that feral hamsters, also, have a basically ratty attitude toward light.

Chu has Blott see whether he can lift a bulky old doorless microwave oven that’s lying on its side up next to one wall, and Blott tries and barely lifts it, and pules, and Chu marks the oven down for the adults to lift and tells Blott to drop it, which invitation Blott takes literally, and the crash and tinkle infuriate Gopnik and McKenna, who say that scanning for rodents with Blott is like fly-fishing with an epileptic, which cheers Traub up quite a bit.

Feral hamsters — bogey-wise right up there with mile-high toddlers, skull-deprived wraiths, carnivorous flora, and marsh-gas that melts your face off and leaves you with exposed gray-and-red facial musculature for the rest of your ghoulish-pariah life, in terms of late-night hair-raising Concavity narratives — are rarely sighted south of the Lucíte walls and ATH-SCME’d checkpoints that delimit the Great Concavity, and only once in a blue moon anywhere south of like the new-border burg of Methuen MA, whose Chamber of Commerce calls it ‘The City That Interdependence Rebuilt,’ and anyway pace Blott are hardly ever seen solo, being the sort of rapacious locust-like mass-movement creature that Canadian agronomists call ‘Piranha of the Plains.’ An infestation of feral hamsters in the waste-rich terrain of metro Boston, to say nothing of the clutter-tunnelled E.T.A. grounds, would be an almost grand-scale public-health disaster, would cause simply no end of adult running-in-circles and knuckle-biting, and would consume megacalories of displaced pre-adolescent stress for the E.T.A. players. Every ear-cocked eye-peeled bag-toting kid in the off-tunnel this afternoon is hoping hamster in a big way, except for Kent Blott, who’s hoping simply and fervently for some sort of rodential sighting or scat-sample that’ll keep him from being disciplinarily hung upside-down in a lavatory stall to shriek until a staff-member finds him. He reminds the Tunnel Clubbers that it’s not like he’d claimed he espied the thing actually heading in this direction, he’d only seen the thing scuttling in a way that seemed to suggest a tendency or like probability of heading in this direction.

One whole box on its side with its frayed strapping tape split has spilled part of a load of old TP-cartridges, old and mostly unlabelled, out onto the tunnel floor in a fannish pattern, and Gopnik and Peterson complain that the cartridge-cases’ sharp edges put holes in their Glad bags, and Blott is dispatched with three bags of cartridges and fruit rinds, each only about half full, back to the lit vestibule outside the Comm.-Ad. tunnel’s start, where a serious pile of bags is starting to pile fragrantly up.

Plus a confirmed feral-hamster sighting, Chu and Gopnik and ‘S.T.P.’

Peterson have agreed, could well distract the Headmaster’s office from post-Eschaton reprisals against Big Buddies Pemulis, Incandenza and Axford, whom the Club’s Eschatonite faction doesn’t want to see reprised against, particularly, though the consensus is nobody would much mind seeing the malefic Ann Kittenplan hung out to dry in a serious way. Plus hamster-incursions could be posited to account for the occult appearance of large and incongruous E.T.A. objects in inappropriate places, which started in August with the thousands of practice balls found scattered all over the blue lobby carpeting and the carefully arranged pyramid of AminoPal energy bars found on Court 6 at dawn drills in mid-September and has gained momentum in a way no one cares for one bit — feral hamsters being notorious draggers and rearrangers of stuff they can’t eat but feel compelled to fuck with anyway, somehow — and so ease the communal near-hysteria the objects have caused among aboriginal blue-collar staff and sub-16 E.T.A. alike. Which would make the Tunnel Club guys something like heroes, fore-seeably.

They move along the tunnel, their mercuric lights Xing and separating and forming jagged angles, colored faintly pink.

But even a confirmed rat would be a coup. Dean of Academic Affairs Mrs. Inc has a violent phobic thing about vermin and waste and insects and overall facility hygiene, and Orkin men with beer-bellies and playing cards with naked girls in high-heeled shoes on the backs (McKenna’s claim) spray the bejeesus out of the E.T.A. grounds twice a semester. None of the younger E.T.A. boys — who have the same post-latency fetish for vermin they have about subterranean access and exclusive Clubs — none of them has ever once gotten to see or trap a rat or roach or even so much as a lousy silverfish anyplace around here. So the unspoken consensus is that a ham-ster’d be optimal but they’d settle for a rat. Just one lousy rat could give the whole Club a legit raison, an explicable reason for congregating underground — all of them are a bit uneasy about liking to congregate underground for no good or clear reason.

‘Sleeps, you think you could lift that and carry it?’

‘Chu man I wouldn’t even get up next to whatever that is much less touch it.’

Blott’s footfalls and tuneless whistling can be heard from far away, returning, and the distant squeak of overhead sneakers.

Gopnik stops and his light pans, playing on faces. ‘OK. Somebody farted.’

‘What’s this up next to it, Sleeps?’ Chu backing up to widen his light’s beam on something broad and squat and dark.

‘Could I get some lights over here on this you guys?’

‘Because did somebody go ahead and cut one in this little unventilated space?’

‘Chu, it’s a room fridge, that’s all.’

‘But it’s bigger than the room fridges.’

‘But it’s not as big as a real fridge.’

‘It’s in-between.’

‘I do smell something, though, Gop, I admit.’

‘There is a smell. If somebody farted, speak up.’

‘Otherwise it’s a smell.’

‘Don’t try to describe it.’

‘Sleeps, that’s no human fart I’ve ever smelled.’

‘It’s too powerful for a fart.’

‘Maybe Teddy Schacht was having an attack and staggered down here just to cut one.’

Peterson trains his light on the midsized brown fridge. ‘You don’t possibly think Chu says ‘No way. No way.’

‘What?’Blott says.

‘Don’t even think it,’ Chu says.

‘I don’t even think any kind of mammal could fart that bad, Chu.’

Peterson’s looking at Chu, both of their faces pale in the mercuric light. ‘No way somebody’d graduate and leave and put their fridge down here without taking the food out.’

Blott goes ‘Is that the smell?’

‘Was this Pearson’s fridge last year?’

Sleepy T.P. turns around. ‘Who smells a, like, a like decay-element?’

Lights on the tunnel ceiling from upraised hands.

‘Quorum on decay-type odor.’

‘Should we check?’ Chu says. ‘Blott’s hamster might be in there.’

‘Gnawing on something unspeakable, maybe.’

‘You mean open it?’

‘Pearson had a bigger than usual fridge.’

“Open it?’

Chu scratches behind his ear. ‘Me and Gop’11 light it up, Peterson opens it.’

‘Why me?’

‘You’re closest, Sleeps. Hold your breath.’

‘Jesus. Well back off up here so I can jump way back if anything like flies out.’

‘Nobody could be so low. Who would go off and leave a full fridge?’

‘Happy to back way, way off,’ says Carl Whale, his light receding.

‘Not even Pearson could be that low, leaving food in an unplugged fridge.’

‘This could explain rodent-attraction and then some.’

‘Now look out … ready? … hummph.’

‘Ow! Get off!’

‘Put the light ov— oh my God.’ ‘Eeeeeeeyu.’ ‘Hhhhwwwww.’ ‘Oh my God.’ ‘Bllaaaaarrr.’

‘Such a smell I’m smelling!’

‘There’s mayonnaise! He left mayonnaise in there.’ ‘Why the bulge in the top of the lid?’ ‘The ballooning carton of orange juice!’ ‘Nothing could live in that, rodent or otherwise.’ ‘So why’s that sandwich-meat moving?’ ‘Maggots?’ ‘Maggots!’

‘Shut it! Sleeps! Kick it shut!’

‘This right here is exactly as close as I’m ever getting to that fridge ever again, Chu.’

‘The smell’s expanding!’

‘I can smell it from here!’: Whale’s tiny distant voice.

‘I’m not enjoying this at all.’

‘This is Death. Woe unto those that gazeth on Death. The Bible.’

‘What’re maggots?’

‘Should we just run really fast the other way?’

‘Second that.’

‘This is probably what the rat or hamster smelled,’ Blott ventures.

‘Run!’

High receding voices, bobbing lights, Whale’s light way out front.

After Stice and Incandenza split the first two sets and Hal dashed into the locker room at the break to put Collyrium-brand eyewash in eyes that were bothering him and deLint made warped crashing sounds on the tiers as he walked down the bleachers and over to have a word with Stice, who was squatting against the net-post holding his left arm up like a scrubbed surgeon and applying a towel to the arm, deLint’s place up next to Helen Steeply was taken by female prorector Thierry Poutrincourt, freshly showered, long-faced, a non-U.S. citizen, a tall Québecer former Satellite pro in rimless specs and a violetish ski cap just enough of a shade away from the journalist’s hat to make the people behind them pretend to shield their eyes from the clash. The putative newshound introduced herself and asked Poutrincourt who the heavy-browed kid was at the end of the top bleacher behind them, hunched over and gesturing and speaking into his empty fist.

‘James Troeltsch of Philadelphia is better to leave alone to play the broadcaster to himself. He is a strange and unhappy,’ Poutrincourt said, her face long and cavern-cheeked and not terribly happy-looking itself. Her slight shrugs and way of looking elsewhere while speaking were not unlike Rémy Marathe’s. ‘When we hear you are the journalist for shiny perfumed magazines of fad and trend we are told be unfriendly, but me, I think I am friendly.’ Her smile was rictal and showed confused teeth. ‘My family’s loved ones also are large of size. It is difficult to be large.’

Steeply’s pre-assignment decision was to let all size-references pass as if there was some ability to screen out any reference to size or girth, originating possibly in adolescence. ‘Your Mr. deLint certainly held himself aloof.’

‘DeLint, when we prorectors are suggested to do a thing, he asks to himself only: how can I perfectly do this thing so the superiors will smile with pleasure at deLint.’ Poutrincourt’s right forearm was almost twice the size of her left. She wore white sneakers and a Donnay warmup of a deep glowing neutron-blue that clashed hideously with both their caps. The circles beneath her eyes were also blue.

‘Why the instructions to be unfriendly?’

Poutrincourt always nodded for a while before she replied to anything, as if things had to go through various translation-circuits. She nodded and scratched at her long jaw, thinking. ‘You are here to make publicity a child player, one of our étoiles,^[273] and Dr. Tavis, he is how you say quantified — ‘

‘Quarantined. Suspicious. Guarded.’

‘No…’

‘Confused. Torn. In a quandary.’

‘Quandary is how. Because this is a good place, and Hal is good, better since before the present, perhaps now he is étoile.’ A shrug, long arms akimbo. Hal reemerged from Comm.-Ad. and, ankle-brace or no, displayed a slow loose thoroughbred trot past the pavilion and bleachers and to the gate in #i2.’s southern fence, acting as if unwatched by people in bleachers, and tapped two of his big-headed tennis racquets together to listen for the strings’ pitch, exchanging some neutral words with deLint, who was standing with Stice at the edge of the transom’s shadow, Stice breaking into a half-laugh at something, twirling his racquet and walking back to serve as Hal retrieved a ball along the north fence. Both players’ racquets had large heads and thick frames. Thierry Poutrincourt said ‘And by nature who does not wish the shiny attention, that the magazines with cologne on their pages say this is étoile, Enfield Tennis Academy it is good?’

‘I’m here to do a soft inoffensive profile on his brother, with Hal mentioned only as part of an American family exceptional in several respects. I don’t see what’s quandariacal for Dr. Tavis about this.’ The tiny plump officious man who seemed to have a phone tucked under his chin at all times, the kind of frenzied over-cooperation that’s a technical interviewer’s worst nightmare for an interrogation; the little man’s monologue had done to Steeply’s brain kind of what a flashbulb does to your eyes, and if he’d explicitly denied him access to the brother then the denial had been slipped in after he’d worn Steeply down.

There was the slight shaken-saw wobble of bleachers as deLint walked back up, stacked charts against his chest like a schoolgirl’s books, his smile at the Québecois player in his seat as if he’d never met her before, settling in heavily on Steeply’s other side, glancing down at where the profiler’d bracketed notes on the possible sounds a string-hit ball sounds like in cold air: cut, king, ping, pons, pock, cop, thwa, thwat.

The samizdat Entertainment’s director’s other son chipped a return that caught the tape and sat there a moment and fell back.

“Veux que nous nous parlons en français? Serait plus facile, ça?’ This invitation because Poutrincourt’s eyes had gone hooded the minute the de-Lint person joined them.

Poutrincourt’s shrug was blase: Francophones are never impressed that anyone else can speak French. ‘Very well then look:’ she said (Poutrincourt did, in Québecois), ‘pubescent stars are nothing new to this sport. Lenglen, Rosewall. In A.D. 1887 a fifteen-year-old girl won Wimbledon, she was the first. Evert in the semifinals of the US Open at sixteen, ‘71 or ‘2. Austin, Jaeger, Graff, Sawamatsu, Venus Williams. Borg. Wilander, Chang, Treffert, Med-vedev, Esconja. Becker of the A.D. ‘8os. Now this new Argentinean Kleckner.’

Steeply lit a Flanderfume that made deLint’s face spread with distaste. ‘You compare it is like gymnastics, figure skating, competitive to-swim.’

Poutrincourt made no comment on Steeply’s syntax. ‘Just so, then. Good.’

Steeply was adjusting the long peasant skirt and crossing legs so he was inclined away from deLint, gazing at a kind of translucent mole on Poutrincourt’s long cheek. Poutrincourt’s thick rimless specs were like a scary nun’s. She looked more male than anything, long and hard and breastless. Steeply tried to exhale away from everyone. ‘The world-plateau tennis not being required to have neither the size and muscle of the hockey nor the basketball nor the American football, for example.’

Poutrincourt nodded. ‘But yes, nor the millimetric precision of your baseball’s hitting, nor how the Italians say the senza errori, the never-miss consistency, that keeps the golfers from true mastery until they have thirty or more years.’ The prorector switched for just a moment to English, possibly for deLint’s benefit: ‘Your French is Parisian but possible. Me, mine is Québecois.’

Steeply now got to give that same sour Gallic shrug. ‘You’re saying to me serious tennis doesn’t need of an athlete anything already adolescents do not possess, if they are exceptional for it.’

‘The medicinists of sports science know well what top tennis requires,’ Poutrincourt said, back in French. ‘Too well, which are the agility, the reflexes,^[274] the short-range speed, the balance, some coordination between the hand and the eye, and very much endurance. Some strength, with particular importance for the male. But all these are achievable by the period of puberty, for some. But yes, but wait,’ she said, putting a hand on the notebook as Steeply started to pretend to inscribe. ‘The thing you have put as the question to me. This is why the quandary. The young players, they have the advantage in psyche, also.’

‘The edge of mentality,’ Steeply said, trying to ignore the boy speaking into his hand several seats over. DeLint seemed to be ignoring everything around him, engrossed in the match and his statistics. The Canadian prorec-tor’s hands moved in small circles out front to indicate engagement in the conversation. Americans’ conversational hands sit like lumps of dough most of the time, Rémy Marathe had pointed out once.

‘But yes, so, the formidable mental edge that their psyches are still not yet adult in all ways — therefore, so, they do not feel the anxiety and pressure in the way it is felt by adult players. This is every story of the teenager appearing from no location to upset the famous adult in professional play — the ephebic, they do not feel the pressure, they can play with abandon, they are without fear.’ A cold smile. Sunlight blazed on her lenses. ‘At the beginning. At the beginning they are without pressure or fear, and they burst from seemingly no location onto the professional stage, instant étoiles, phenomenal, fearless, immunized to pressure, numb to anxiety — at first. They seem as if they are like the adult players only better — better in emotion, more abandoned, not human to the stress or fatigue or the airplaning without end, to the publicity.’

‘The English expression of the child in the store of candy.’

‘Seemingly unfeeling of the loneliness and alienation and everyone wants a thing from the étoile.’

‘The money, also.’

‘But it is soon you start to see the burning out which the place like ours is hoping to prevent. You remember Jaeger, burned out at sixteen, Austin at twenty. Arias and Krickstein, Esconja and Treffert, too injured to play on by their late teenage years. The much-promising Capriati, the well-known tragedy. Pat Cash of Australia, fourth on earth at eighteen, vanished by the twenties of age.’

‘Not to be mentioning the large money. The endorsings and appearings.’

‘Always so, for the young étoile. And now worse in today, that the sponsors have no broadcasting to advertise with. Now the ephebe who is famous étoile, who is in magazines and the sports reports aux disques, he is pursued to become the Billboard Who Walks. Use this, wear this, for money. Millions thrown at you before you can drive the cars you buy. The head swells to the size of a balloon, why not?’

‘But can pressure be far behind the back?’ Steeply said.

‘Many times the same. Winning two and three upset matches, feeling suddenly so loved, so many talking to you as if there is love. But always the same, then. For then you awaken to the fact that you are loved for winning only. The two and three wins created you, for people. It is not that the wins made them recognize something that existed unrecognized before these upset wins. The from-noplace winning created you. You must keep winning to keep the existence of love and endorsements and the shiny magazines wanting your profile.’

‘Enter the pressure,’ Steeply said.

‘Pressure such as one could not imagine, now that to maintain you must win. Now that winning is the expected. And all alone, in the hotels and the airplanes, with any other player you could speak to of the pressure to exist wanting to beat you, wanting to be exist above and not below. Or the others, wanting from you, and only so long as you play with abandon, winning.’

‘Hence the suicides. The burn-out. The drugs, the self-indulging, the spoilage.’

‘What is the instruction if we shape the ephebe into the athlete who can win fearlessly to be loved, yet we do not prepare her for the time after fear comes, no?’

‘Therefore the terrible pressure here. They are being tempered. Oven-toughened.’

Hal served wide and this time followed it in, the serve, taking a stutter-step at the service line. Slice’s body seemed to elongate as he reached and got the stick up over the return, driving a forehand. Hal volleyed it too short and took a couple steps off the net as Stice came in, winding up for an easy pass. Hal guessed a direction and started to his left, and The Darkness chipped a lob right over him and hit the heel of his hand against his strings as Hal gave it up halfway back, Stice not rubbing it in but exhorting himself. Hal’s sweat was way heavier than the Kansan’s, but Slice’s face was almost maroon with flush. Each player twirled his stick in his hand as Hal walked back to retrieve the ball. Stice took his position in the deuce court, pulling up his socks.

‘Still smart for Hal to follow the serve in once a game or so,’ deLint said into Steeply’s ear.

And irritating throughout was the heavy-browed red-nostriled kid James Troeltsch at the very end of the top bleacher, speaking into his fist, coming at the fist from first one angle and then another, pretending to be two people:

‘Incandenza the controller. Incandenza the tactician.

‘Rare tactical lapse for Incandenza, following the serve in when he’s just finally started establishing control from the baseline.

‘Have a look at Incandenza standing there waiting for Ortho Stice to finish futzing with his socks so he can serve. The resemblance to statues of Augustus of Rome. The regal bearing, the set of the head, the face impassive and emanating command. The chilly blue eyes.

‘The chilly reptilian film of concentration in the cold blue eyes, Jim.

‘The Halster’s been having some trouble controlling his volleys.

‘Personally, Jim, I think he’d be better off with his old midsized graphite stick than that large head the creepy Dunlop guy got him to switch to.

‘Stice being the younger player out there, he’s grown up with the extra-large head. A large head is all The Darkness knows.

‘You could say Stice was born with a large head, and that Incandenza’s a man who’s adapted his game to a large head.

‘Hal’s career dating back to before your polycarbonate resins changed the whole power-matrix of the junior game, too, Jim.

‘And what a day for tennis.

‘What a day for family fun of all kinds.

This Bud’s for the Whole Family. It’s the Bud Match of the Week. Brought to you.

‘Incandenza even reported to have modified his grip, all to accommodate the large head.

‘And by the Multiphasix family of fine graphite-reinforced polycarbonate resins, Ray.

‘Jim, Ortho Stice — impossible to even visualize Stice without his trusty large head.

‘It’s all they know, these kids.’

DeLint hiked back onto an elbow on the tier above and told James Troeltsch to regulate the volume or he was going to take a personal interest in seeing Troeltsch suffer.

Hal bounced the ball three times, tossed, rocked farther back on the toss, and absolutely crunched the serve, spinless and wickedly angled out wide, Stice grotesquely off-balance, lunging too far and hitting the backhand cramped, down the line and shallow. Hal moved in to the service line for it, hunched and with his stick cocked up behind him, looking somehow insec-tile. Stice stood in the middle of the baseline awaiting pace and was helpless when Hal shortened the stroke and dribbled it at an angle cross-court, barely clearing the net and distorted with backspin and falling into the half-meter of fair space the acuteness of the angle allowed.

‘Hal Incandenza has the greater tennis brain,’ Poutrincourt said in English.

Hal aced Stice down the center to go up either 2–1 or 3–2 in the third.

‘The thing you want to know about Hal, babe, is he’s got a complete game,’ deLint said as the boys changed ends of the court, Stice holding two balls out before him on the face of his racquet. Hal went to the towel again. The children along the bottom tier were leaning left and then right in tandem, amusing themselves. The apparition with the lens and metal pole was gone, overhead.

‘What you want to know, watching juniors at this level,’ deLint says, still back on an elbow so his upper body was out of sight and he was just legs and a voice in Steeply’s cold ear. ‘They all have different strengths, areas of the game they’re better at, and you can drown in profiling a match or a player in terms of the different strengths and the number of individual strengths.’

‘I am not here to profile the boy,’ Steeply said, but in French again.

DeLint ignored him. ‘It’s not just the strengths or the number of strengths. It’s do they come together to make a game. How complete is a kid. Has he got a game. Those kids at lunch you got to meet.’

‘But not speak to.’

‘The kid in the idiotic hat, Pemulis, Mike’s got great, great volleys, he’s a natural at net, great, great hand-eye. Mike’s other strength is he’s got the best lob in East Coast juniors bar none. These are his strengths. The reason both of these kids you’re looking at out here right now can beat the living shit out of Pemulis is Pemulis’s strengths don’t give him a complete game. Volleys’re an offensive shot. A lob’s a baseliner’s weapon, counterpuncher. You can’t lob from the net or volley from the baseline.’

‘He says Michael Pemulis’s abilities cancel each other out,’^[275] Poutrin-court said in the other ear.

DeLint made the small salaam of iteration. ‘Pemulis’s strengths cancel each other out. Now Todd Possalthwaite, the littler kid with the bandage on his nose from the soap-and-shower-slipping thing, Possalthwaite’s also got a great lob, and while Pemulis’d take him right now on pure age and power Possalthwaite’s the technically superior player with the better future, because Todd’s built a complete game out of his lob.’

‘This deLint is wrong,’ Poutrincourt said in Québecois, smiling rictally across Steeply at deLint.

‘Because Possalthwaite won’t come in to net. Possalthwaite hangs back at any cost, and unlike Pemulis he works to develop the groundstrokes to let him stay back and draw the other guy in and use that venomous lob.’

‘Which means at fourteen his game, it will never change or grow, and if he grows strong and wishes to attack he will never be able,’ Poutrincourt said.

DeLint displayed so little curiosity about what Poutrincourt inserted that Steeply wondered if he had some French on the sly, and made a private ideogram to this effect. ‘Possalthwaite’s a pure defensive strategist. He’s got a gestalt. The term we use here for a complete game is either gestalt or complete game.’

Stice aced Hal out wide on the ad court again, and the ball got stuck in an intersticial diamond in the chain-link fencing, and Hal had to put his stick down and use both hands to force the thing out.

‘Maybe for your article, though, the poop on this kid, the punter’s brother — Hal can’t lob half as good as even Possalthwaite, and compared to Ortho or Mike his net-play’s pedestrian. But unlike his brother when he was here, see, Hal’s strengths have started to fit together. He’s got a great serve, a great return of serve, and great, great groundstrokes, with great control and great touch, great command of touch and spin; and he can take a defensive player and yank the kid around with his superior control, and he can take an attacking player and use the guy’s own pace against him.’

Hal passed Stice off the backhand down the line and the ball looked sure to land fair, and then at the last possible second it veered out, an abrupt tight curve out of bounds as if some freak gust came out of nowhere and blew it out, and Stice looked more surprised than Hal did. The punter’s brother’s face registered nothing as he stood at the ad corner, adjusting something on his strings.

‘But perhaps one does attain this, to win. Imagine you. You become just what you have given your life to be. Not merely very good but the best. The good philosophy of here and Schtitt — I believe this philosophy of Enfield is more Canadian than American, so you may see I have prejudice — is that you must have also — so, leave to one side for a moment the talent and work to become best — that you are doomed^[276] if you do not have also within you some ability to transcend the goal, transcend the success of the best, if you get to there.’

Steeply could see, off in the parking lot behind the hideous bulging neo-Georgian cube of the Community and Administration Building, several small boys carrying and dragging white plastic bags to the nest of dumpsters that abutted the pines at the parking lot’s rear, the children pale and wild-eyed and conferring among themselves and casting anxious looks across the grounds at the crowd behind the Show Court.

‘Then,’ Poutrincourt said, ‘and for the ones who do become the étoiles, the lucky who become profiled and photographed for readers and in the U.S.A. religion make it, they must have something built into them along the path that will let them transcend it, or they are doomed. We see this in experience. One sees this in all obsessive goal-based cultures of pursuit. Look at the Japonois, the suicide rates of their later years. This task of us at the Enfield is more delicate still, with the étoiles. For, you, if you attain your goal and cannot find some way to transcend the experience of having that goal be your entire existence, your raison de faire,^[277] so, then, one of two things we see will happen.’

Steeply had to keep breathing on the pen to keep the point thawed.

‘One, one is that you attain the goal and realize the shocking realization that attaining the goal does not complete or redeem you, does not make everything for your life “OK” as you are, in the culture, educated to assume it will do this, the goal. And then you face this fact that what you had thought would have the meaning does not have the meaning when you get it, and you are impaled by shock. We see suicides in history by people at these pinnacles; the children here are versed in what is called the saga of Eric Clipperton.’

‘With two p’s?’

‘Just so. Or the other possibility of doom, for the étoiles who attain. They attain the goal, thus, and put as much equal passion into celebrating their attainment as they had put into pursuing the attainment. This is called here the Syndrome of the Endless Party. The celebrity, money, sexual behaviors, drugs and substances. The glitter. They become celebrities instead of players, and because they are celebrities only as long as they feed the culture-of-goal’s hunger for the make-it, the winning, they are doomed, because you cannot both celebrate and suffer, and play is always suffering, just so.’

‘Our best boy is better than Hal, you’ll see him play tomorrow if you want, John Wayne. No relation to the real John Wayne. A fellow compatriot of Terry here.’ Aubrey deLint was sitting back up beside them, the cold giving his pitted cheeks a second flush, two feverish harlequin ovals. ‘John Wayne’s got a gestalt because Wayne’s simply got everything, and everything with him’s got the sort of pace that a touch-artist and thinker like Hal just can’t handle.’

‘This was the Founder’s philosophy, too, of doom, the punter Incan-denza’s father, who also I am being told dabbled in filming?’ Steeply asked the Canadian.

Poutrincourt’s shrug could have meant too many things to note. ‘I came after. M. Schtitt, his different goal for the étoiles is to walk between these.’ Nor did Steeply quite notice the woman’s shifts between dialects. ‘To map out some path between needing the success and mockery-making of the success.’

DeLint leaned in. ‘Wayne’s got everything. Hal’s strength has become knowing he doesn’t have everything, and constructing a game as much out of what’s missing as what’s there.’

Steeply pretended to arrange the cap but was really adjusting the wig. ‘It all sounds awfully abstract for something so physical.’

Poutrincourt’s shrug pushed her glasses slightly up. ‘It is contradictory. Two selves, one not there. M. Schtitt, when the Academy Founder died …’

‘The punter’s father, who dabbled in films.’ Steeply’s raglan sweater had been his wife’s.

Again nodding blandly, Poutrincourt: ‘This academic Founder, M. Schtitt tells that this Founder was a student of types of sight.’

DeLint said ‘Wayne’s only possible limits being also his strength, the tungsten-steel will and resolve, the insistence on imposing his game and his will on his man, totally unwilling to change the pace of his game if he’s not doing good. Wayne’s got the touch and the lobs to hang back on an off-day, but he won’t — if he’s down or things aren’t going his way, he just hits harder. His pace is so overwhelming he can get away with being uncompromising about attack against North American juniors. But in the Show, which Wayne’ll go pro maybe as soon as next year, in the Show flexibility is more important, he’ll find. What do you call, a humility.’

Poutrincourt was looking at Steeply almost too carelessly, it almost seemed. ‘The studying was not so much how one sees a thing, but this relation between oneself and what one sees. He translated this numerously across different fields, M. Schtitt tells.’

The son described his father as quote “genre-dysphoric.”

Poutrincourt cocked her head. ‘This does not sound like Hal Incan-denza.’

DeLint sniffed meatily. ‘But Wayne’s gestalt’s chief edge over Hal is the head. Wayne is pure force. He doesn’t feel fear, pity, remorse — when a point’s over, it might as well have never happened. For Wayne. Hal actually has finer groundstrokes than Wayne, and he could have Wayne’s pace if he wanted. But the reason Wayne is Three continentally and Hal’s Six is the head. Hal looks just as perfectly dead out there, but he’s more vulnerable in terms of, like, emotionally. Hal remembers points, senses trends in a match. Wayne doesn’t. Hal’s susceptible to fluctuations. Discouragement. Set-long lapses in concentration. Some days you can almost see Hal like flit in and out of a match, like some part of him leaves and hovers and then comes back.’

The Troeltsch person said ‘Holy crow.’

‘So to survive here for later is, finally, to have it both ways,’ Thierry Poutrincourt said quietly, in nearly accentless English, as if to herself.

‘This emotional susceptibility in terms of forgetting being more commonly a female thing. Schtitt and I think it’s a will issue. Susceptible wills are more common to the top girls here. We see it in Longley, we see it in Millie Kent and Frannie Unwin. We don’t see this forgetful will in the Vaughts, or in Spodek, who you can watch if you want.’

The Troeltsch person said ‘Could we see that again, Ray, do you think?’

Steeply was looking at the side of Poutrincourt’s face as deLint on the other side was saying ‘But the one we see this most in is Hal.’