Infinite Jest Part 18

The homeward ride's camaraderie was marred only by the fact that someone near the back of the bus started the pa.s.sing around of a Gothic-fonted leaflet offering the kingdom of prehistoric England to the man who could pull Keith Freer out of Bernadette Longley. Freer had been discovered by prorector Mary Esther Thode more or less Xing poor Bernadette Longley under an Adidas blanket in the very back seat on the bus trip to the East Coast Clays in Providence in September, and it had been a nasty scene, because there were some basic Academy-license rules that it was just unacceptable to flout under the nose of staff. Keith Freer was deeply asleep when the leaflet was getting pa.s.sed around, but Bernadette Longley wasn't, and when the leaflet hit the front half where all the females now had to sit since September she'd buried her face in her hands and flushed even on the back of her pretty neck, and her doubles partner 92 92 came all the way back to where Jim Struck and Michael Pemulis were sitting and told them in no uncertain terms that somebody on this bus was so immature it was really sad. came all the way back to where Jim Struck and Michael Pemulis were sitting and told them in no uncertain terms that somebody on this bus was so immature it was really sad.

Charles Tavis was irrepressible. He did a Pierre Trudeau impersonation no one except the driver was old enough to laugh at. And the whole mammoth travelling squad, three buses' worth, got to stop and have the Mega-breakfast at Denny's, over next to Empire Waste, at like 0030, when they got in.

Hal's eldest brother Orin Incandenza got out of compet.i.tive tennis when Hal was nine and Mario nearly eleven. This was during the period of great pre-Experialist upheaval and the emergence of the fringe C.U.S.P. of Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner, and the tumescence of O.N.A.N.ism. At late seventeen, Orin was ranked in the low 70s nationally; he was a senior; he was at that awful age for a low-70s player where age eighteen and the terminus of a junior career are looming and either: (1) you're going to surrender your dreams of the Show and go to college and play college tennis; or (2) you're going to get your full spectrum of gram-negative and cholera and amoebic-dysentery shots and try to eke out some kind of sad diasporic existence on a Eurasian satellite pro tour and try to hop those last few compet.i.tive plateaux up to Show-caliber as an adult; or (3) or you don't know what you're going to do; and it's often an awful time. 93 93 E.T.A. tries to dilute the awfulness a little by letting eight or nine postgraduates stay on for two years and serve in deLint's platoon of prorectors 94 94 in exchange for room and board and travel expenses to small sad satellite tourneys, and Orin's being directly related to E.T.A. Administration obviously gave him kind of a lock on a prorector appointment if he wanted it, but a prorector's job was only for maybe at most a few years, and was regarded as sad and purgatorial... and then of course what then, what are you going to do after in exchange for room and board and travel expenses to small sad satellite tourneys, and Orin's being directly related to E.T.A. Administration obviously gave him kind of a lock on a prorector appointment if he wanted it, but a prorector's job was only for maybe at most a few years, and was regarded as sad and purgatorial... and then of course what then, what are you going to do after that, that, etc. etc.

Orin's decision to attend college pleased his parents a great deal, though Mrs. Avril Incandenza, especially, had gone out of her way to make it clear that whatever Orin decided to do would please them because they stood squarely behind and in full support of him, Orin, and any decision his very best thinking yielded. But they were still in favor of college, privately, you could tell. Orin was clearly not ever going to be a professional-caliber adult tennis player. His compet.i.tive peak had come at thirteen, when he'd gotten to the 14-and-Under quarterfinals of the National Clays in Indianapolis IN and in the Quarters had taken a set off the second seed; but starting soon after that he'd suffered athletically from the same delayed p.u.b.erty that had compromised his father when Himself had been a junior player, and having boys he'd cleaned the clocks of at twelve and thirteen become now seemingly overnight mannish and deep-chested and hairy-legged and starting now to clean Orin's own clock at fourteen and fifteen - this had sucked some kind of compet.i.tive afflatus out of him, broken his tennis spirit, Orin, and his U.S.T.A. ranking had nosedived through three years until it levelled off somewhere in the low 70s, which meant that by age fifteen he wasn't even qualifying for the major events' main 64-man draw. When E.T.A. opened, his ranking among the Boys' 18s hovered around 10 and he was relegated to a middle spot on the Academy's B-squad, a mediocrity that sort of becalmed his verve even further. His style was essentially that of a baseliner, a counterpuncher, but without the return of serve or pa.s.sing shots you need to stand much of a chance against a quality net-man. The E.T.A. rap on Orin was that he lobbed well but too often. He did have a phenomenal lob: he could hug the curve of the dome of the Lung and three times out of four nail a large-sized coin placed on the opposite baseline; he and Marlon Bain and two or three other marginal counterpunching boys at E.T.A. all had phenomenal lobs, honed through spare P.M. devoted more and more to Eschaton, which by the most plausible account a Croatian-refugee transfer had brought up from the Palmer Academy in Tampa. Orin was Eschaton's first game-master at E.T.A., where in the first Eschaton generations it was mostly marginal and deafflatusized uppercla.s.smen who played.

College was the comparatively obvious choice, then, for Orin, as the time of decision drew nigh. Oblique family pressures aside, as a low-ranked player at E.T.A. he'd had stiffer academic demands than did those for whom the real Show had seemed like a viable goal. And the Eschatonology helped a great deal with the math/computer stuff E.T.A. tended to be a bit weak in, both Himself and Scht.i.tt being at that point pretty anti-quant.i.tative. His grades were solid. His board-scores weren't going to embarra.s.s anybody. Orin was basically academically sound, especially for a somebody with a top-level compet.i.tive sport on his secondary transcript.

And you have to understand that mediocrity is relative in a sport like junior tennis. A national ranking of 74 in Boys 18-and-Under Singles, while mediocre by the standards of aspiring pros, is enough to make most college coaches' chins s.h.i.+ny. Orin got a couple Pac-10 offers. Big 10 offers. U. New Mexico actually hired a mariachi band that established itself under his dorm-room's window six nights running until Mrs. Incandenza got Himself to authorize 'F. D. V.' Harde to electrify the fences. Ohio State flew him out to Columbus for such a weekend of 'prospective orientation' that when Orin got back he had to stay in bed for three days drinking Alka-Seltzer with an ice pack on his groin. Cal-Tech offered him an ROTC waiver and A.P. standing in their elite Strategic Studies program after Decade Magazine Decade Magazinehad run a short interest-piece on Orin and the Croate and Eschaton's applied use of c:Pink2. 95 95 Orin chose B.U. Boston U. Not a tennis power. Not in Cal-Tech's league academically. Not the sort of place that hires bands or flies you out for Roman orgies of inducement. And only just about three clicks down the hill and Comm. Ave. from E.T.A., west of the Bay, around the intersection of Commonwealth and Beacon, Boston. It was kind of a joint Orin Incandenza/Avril Incandenza decision. Orin's Moms privately thought it was important for Orin to be away from home, psychologically speaking, but still to be able to come home whenever he wished. She put everything to Orin in terms of worrying that her concern over what'd be best for him psychologically might prompt her to overstep her maternal bounds and speak out of turn or give intrusive advice. According to all her lists and advantage-disadvantage charts, B.U. was from every angle far and away O.'s best choice, but to keep ever from overstepping or lobbying intrusively the Moms actually for six weeks would flee any room Orin entered, both hands clapped over her mouth. Orin had this way his face would get when she'd beg him not to let her influence his choice. It was during this period that Orin had characterized the Moms to Hal as a kind of contortionist with other people's bodies, which Hal's never been able to forget. Himself, from his own experience, probably thought it'd be better for Orin to get the h.e.l.l out of Dodge altogether, do something Midwest or PAC, but he kept his own counsel. He never had to struggle not to overstep. He probably figured Orin was a big boy. This was four years and 30-some released entertainments before Himself put his head in a microwave oven, fatally. Then it turned out Avril's adoptive-slash-half-brother Charles Tavis, who at this time was back chairing A.S.A. at Throppinghams.h.i.+re, 96 96 turned out to be old minor-sport-athletic-administration-network friends with Boston University's varsity tennis coach. Tavis flew down special on Air Canada to set up a meet between the four of them, Avril and son and Tavis and the B.U. tennis coach. The B.U. tennis coach was a septuagenaric Ivy League guy, one of those emptily craggily handsome old patrician men whose profile looks like it ought to be on a coin, who liked his 'lads' to wear all white and actually literally vault the net, win or lose, after matches. B.U. had only had a couple nationally ranked players, like ever, and that had been in the A.D. 1960s, way before this fas.h.i.+on-conscious guy's tenure; and when the coach saw Orin play he about fell over sideways. Recall how mediocrity is contextual. B.U.'s players all hailed (literally) from New England country clubs and wore ironed shorts and those f.a.ggy white tennis sweaters with that blood-colored stripe across the chest, and talked without moving their jaw, and played the sort of stiff and patrician serve-and-volley game you play if you've had lots of summer lessons and club round-robins but had never ever had to get out there and kill or die, psychically. Orin wore cut-off jeans and deck-sneakers w/o socks and yawned compulsively as he beat B.U.'s immaculately groomed #1 Singles man 2 and 0, hitting something like 40 offensive lobs for winners. Then at the four-way meeting Tavis arranged, the old B.U. coach showed up in L.L. Bean chinos and a Lacoste polo s.h.i.+rt and got a look at the size of Orin's left arm, and then at Orin's Moms in a tight black skirt and levantine jacket with kohl around her eyes and a moussed tower of hair and about fell back over sideways the other way. She had this effect on older men, somehow. Orin was in a position to dictate terms limited only by the parameters of B.U.'s own sports-budget marginality. turned out to be old minor-sport-athletic-administration-network friends with Boston University's varsity tennis coach. Tavis flew down special on Air Canada to set up a meet between the four of them, Avril and son and Tavis and the B.U. tennis coach. The B.U. tennis coach was a septuagenaric Ivy League guy, one of those emptily craggily handsome old patrician men whose profile looks like it ought to be on a coin, who liked his 'lads' to wear all white and actually literally vault the net, win or lose, after matches. B.U. had only had a couple nationally ranked players, like ever, and that had been in the A.D. 1960s, way before this fas.h.i.+on-conscious guy's tenure; and when the coach saw Orin play he about fell over sideways. Recall how mediocrity is contextual. B.U.'s players all hailed (literally) from New England country clubs and wore ironed shorts and those f.a.ggy white tennis sweaters with that blood-colored stripe across the chest, and talked without moving their jaw, and played the sort of stiff and patrician serve-and-volley game you play if you've had lots of summer lessons and club round-robins but had never ever had to get out there and kill or die, psychically. Orin wore cut-off jeans and deck-sneakers w/o socks and yawned compulsively as he beat B.U.'s immaculately groomed #1 Singles man 2 and 0, hitting something like 40 offensive lobs for winners. Then at the four-way meeting Tavis arranged, the old B.U. coach showed up in L.L. Bean chinos and a Lacoste polo s.h.i.+rt and got a look at the size of Orin's left arm, and then at Orin's Moms in a tight black skirt and levantine jacket with kohl around her eyes and a moussed tower of hair and about fell back over sideways the other way. She had this effect on older men, somehow. Orin was in a position to dictate terms limited only by the parameters of B.U.'s own sports-budget marginality. 97 97 Orin signed a Letter of Intent accepting a Full Ride to B.U., plus books and a Hitachi lap-top w/ software and off-campus housing and living expenses and a lucrative work-study job where his job was to turn on the sprinklers every morning at the B.U. football Terriers' historic Nickerson Field, sprinklers that were already on automatic timers - the sprinkler job was B.U.'s tennis team's one plum, recruitment-wise. Charles Tavis - who at Avril's urging that fall cashed in his Canadian return ticket and stayed on as a.s.sistant Headmaster to a.s.sist Orin's father's oversight of the Academy Orin signed a Letter of Intent accepting a Full Ride to B.U., plus books and a Hitachi lap-top w/ software and off-campus housing and living expenses and a lucrative work-study job where his job was to turn on the sprinklers every morning at the B.U. football Terriers' historic Nickerson Field, sprinklers that were already on automatic timers - the sprinkler job was B.U.'s tennis team's one plum, recruitment-wise. Charles Tavis - who at Avril's urging that fall cashed in his Canadian return ticket and stayed on as a.s.sistant Headmaster to a.s.sist Orin's father's oversight of the Academy 98 98 in a progressively more and more total capacity as both in- and external travels took J. O. Incandenza away from Enfield more and more often - said 3 years later that he'd never really expected a Thank-You from Orin anyway, for liaisoning with the B.U. tennis apparatus, that he wasn't in this for the Thank-Yous, that a person who did a service in a progressively more and more total capacity as both in- and external travels took J. O. Incandenza away from Enfield more and more often - said 3 years later that he'd never really expected a Thank-You from Orin anyway, for liaisoning with the B.U. tennis apparatus, that he wasn't in this for the Thank-Yous, that a person who did a service for for somebody's grat.i.tude was more like a 2-D cutout image of a person than a bona fide person; at least that's what he thought, he said; he said what did Avril and Hal and Mario think? was he a genuine 3-D person? was he perhaps just rationalizing away some legitimate hurt? did Orin maybe resent him for seeming to move in just as he, Orin, moved out? though surely not for Tavis's a.s.suming more and more total control of the E.T.A. helm as J. O. Incandenza spent increasingly long hiati either off with Mario on shoots or editing in his room off the tunnel or in alcohol-rehabilitative facilities (13 of them over those final three years; Tavis has the Blue Cross statements right here), and even more surely not for the final felo de se anyone with any kind of denial-free sensitivity could have predicted for the past 3 somebody's grat.i.tude was more like a 2-D cutout image of a person than a bona fide person; at least that's what he thought, he said; he said what did Avril and Hal and Mario think? was he a genuine 3-D person? was he perhaps just rationalizing away some legitimate hurt? did Orin maybe resent him for seeming to move in just as he, Orin, moved out? though surely not for Tavis's a.s.suming more and more total control of the E.T.A. helm as J. O. Incandenza spent increasingly long hiati either off with Mario on shoots or editing in his room off the tunnel or in alcohol-rehabilitative facilities (13 of them over those final three years; Tavis has the Blue Cross statements right here), and even more surely not for the final felo de se anyone with any kind of denial-free sensitivity could have predicted for the past 312 years; but, C.T. opined on 4 July Y.D.P.A.H. after Orin, who now had plenty of free summer time, declined his fifth straight invitation back to Enfield and his family's annual barbecue and Wimbledon-Finals-InterLace-spontaneous-dissemination-watching, Orin might just be harboring a resentment over C.T. moving into the Headmaster's office and changing the door's 'TE OCCIDERE POSSUNT...' before Himself's microwaved head had even cooled, even if it was to take over a Headmaster's job that had been positively keening keening to have someone sedulous and brisk take over. Incandenza Himself having eliminated his own map on 1 April of the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar just as spring Letters of Intent were due from seniors who'd decided to slouch off to college tennis, just as invitations for the European-dirt-circuit Invitationals were pouring in all over Lateral Alice Moore's paraboloid desk, just as E.T.A.'s tax-exempt status was coming up for review before the M.D.R. to have someone sedulous and brisk take over. Incandenza Himself having eliminated his own map on 1 April of the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar just as spring Letters of Intent were due from seniors who'd decided to slouch off to college tennis, just as invitations for the European-dirt-circuit Invitationals were pouring in all over Lateral Alice Moore's paraboloid desk, just as E.T.A.'s tax-exempt status was coming up for review before the M.D.R. 99 99 Exemption Panel, just as the school was trying to readjust to new O.N.A.N.T.A.-accreditation procedures after years of U.S.T.A.-accreditation procedures, just as litigations with Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital over alleged damage from E.T.A.'s initial hilltop-flattening and with Empire Waste Displacement over the flight-paths of Concavity-bound displacement vehicles were reaching the appellate stage, just as applications and fellows.h.i.+ps for the Fall term were in the final stages of review and response. Well Exemption Panel, just as the school was trying to readjust to new O.N.A.N.T.A.-accreditation procedures after years of U.S.T.A.-accreditation procedures, just as litigations with Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital over alleged damage from E.T.A.'s initial hilltop-flattening and with Empire Waste Displacement over the flight-paths of Concavity-bound displacement vehicles were reaching the appellate stage, just as applications and fellows.h.i.+ps for the Fall term were in the final stages of review and response. Well someone someone had had to come in and fill the void, and that person was going to have to be someone who could achieve Total Worry without becoming paralyzed by the worry or by the absence of minimal Thank-Yous for inglorious duties discharged in the stead of a person whose replacement was naturally, had had to come in and fill the void, and that person was going to have to be someone who could achieve Total Worry without becoming paralyzed by the worry or by the absence of minimal Thank-Yous for inglorious duties discharged in the stead of a person whose replacement was naturally, naturally naturally going to come in for some resentment, Tavis felt, since since you can't get mad at a dying man, much less at a dead man, who better to a.s.sume the stress of filling in as anger-object than that dead man's thankless inglorious sedulous untiring 3-D bureaucratic a.s.sistant and replacement, whose own upstairs room was right next to the HmH's master bedroom and who might, by some grieving parties, be viewed as some kind of interloping usurper. Tavis had been ready for all this stress and more, he told the a.s.sembled Academy in preparatory remarks before last year's Fall term Convocation, speaking through amplification from the red-and-gray-bunting-draped crow's nest of Gerhardt Scht.i.tt's transom down into the rows of folding chairs arranged all along the base-and sidelines of E.T.A. Courts 69: he not only fully accepted the stress and resentment, he said he had worked hard and would continue, in his dull quiet unromantic fas.h.i.+on, to work hard to remain open to it, to this resentment and sense of loss and irreplaceability, even after four years, to let everyone who needed to get it out get it out, the anger and resentment and possible contempt, for their own psychological health, since Tavis acknowledged publicly that there was more than enough on every E.T.A.'s plate to begin with as it was. The Convocation a.s.sembly was outside, on the Center Courts that in winter are sheltered by the Lung. It was 31 August in the Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland, hot and muggy. Upper-cla.s.smen who'd heard these same basic remarks for the past four years made little razor-to-jugular and hangman's-noose-over-imaginary-cross-beam motions, listening. The sky overhead was gla.s.sy blue between clots and strings of clouds moving swiftly north. On Courts 3032 the Applied Music Chorus guys kept up a background of ' going to come in for some resentment, Tavis felt, since since you can't get mad at a dying man, much less at a dead man, who better to a.s.sume the stress of filling in as anger-object than that dead man's thankless inglorious sedulous untiring 3-D bureaucratic a.s.sistant and replacement, whose own upstairs room was right next to the HmH's master bedroom and who might, by some grieving parties, be viewed as some kind of interloping usurper. Tavis had been ready for all this stress and more, he told the a.s.sembled Academy in preparatory remarks before last year's Fall term Convocation, speaking through amplification from the red-and-gray-bunting-draped crow's nest of Gerhardt Scht.i.tt's transom down into the rows of folding chairs arranged all along the base-and sidelines of E.T.A. Courts 69: he not only fully accepted the stress and resentment, he said he had worked hard and would continue, in his dull quiet unromantic fas.h.i.+on, to work hard to remain open to it, to this resentment and sense of loss and irreplaceability, even after four years, to let everyone who needed to get it out get it out, the anger and resentment and possible contempt, for their own psychological health, since Tavis acknowledged publicly that there was more than enough on every E.T.A.'s plate to begin with as it was. The Convocation a.s.sembly was outside, on the Center Courts that in winter are sheltered by the Lung. It was 31 August in the Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland, hot and muggy. Upper-cla.s.smen who'd heard these same basic remarks for the past four years made little razor-to-jugular and hangman's-noose-over-imaginary-cross-beam motions, listening. The sky overhead was gla.s.sy blue between clots and strings of clouds moving swiftly north. On Courts 3032 the Applied Music Chorus guys kept up a background of 'Tenabrae Factae Sunt,' sotto v. Everybody had had on the black armbands everybody still wore for functions and a.s.semblies, to keep from forgetting; and the cotton U.S. and crisp nylon O.N.A.N. flags flapped and clanked halfway down the driveway's poles in remembrance. The Sunstrand Plaza still as of that fall hadn't yet found a way to m.u.f.fle its East Newton ATHSCME fans, and Tavis's voice, which even with the police bullhorn tended to sound distant and receding anyway, wove in and out of the sound of the fans and the whump of the E.W.D. catapults and locusts' electric screams and the exhaust-rich hot rush of the summer wind up off Comm. Ave. and the car-horns and Green Line's trundle and clang and the clank of the flags' poles and wires, and everybody but the staff and littlest kids up front missed most of Tavis's explanation that Salic law'd nothing to do with the fact that there was simply no way the late Headmaster's beloved spouse and E.T.A. Dean of Academic Affairs and of Females Mrs. Avril Incandenza could have become Headmaster: how would 'Headmistress' have sounded? and she had the females and female prorectors and Harde's custodians to oversee, and curricula and a.s.signments and schedules, and complex new O.N.A.N.T.A. accreditation to finalize the Kafkan application for, plus daily HmH-sterilization and personal-ablution rituals and the constant battle against anthracnose and dry-climate blight in the dining room's Green Babies, plus of course E.T.A. teaching duties on top of that, with the addition of untold sleepless nights with the Militant Grammarians of Ma.s.sachusetts, the academic PAC that watchdogged media-syntax and invited florid fish-lipped guys from the French Academy to come speak with trilled r r's on prescriptive preservation, and held marathon multireadings of e.g. Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language,' and whose Avril-chaired Tactical Phalanx (MGM's) was then (unsuccessfully, it turned out) court-fighting the new Gentle administration's t.i.tle-II/G-public-funded-library-phaseout-fat-tr.i.m.m.i.n.g initiative, besides of course being practically laid out flat with grief and having to do all the emotional-processing work attendant on working through that kind of personal trauma, on top of all of which a.s.suming the administrative tiller of E.T.A. itself would have been simply an insupportable burden she's thanked C.T. effusively on more than one public occasion for leaving the plush sinecure of Throppinghams.h.i.+re and coming down to undertake the stress-ridden tasks not only of bureaucratic administration and insuring as smooth a transition as possible but of being there for the Incandenza family itself, w/ or w/o Thank-Yous, and for helping support not only Orin's career and inst.i.tutional decision-processes but also for being there supportively for all involved when Orin made his seminal choice not to go ahead and play compet.i.tive college tennis after all, at B.U.

What happened was that by the third week of his freshman year Orin was attempting an extremely unlikely defection from college tennis to college football. The reason he gave his parents - Avril made it clear that the very last thing she wanted was to have any of her children feel they had to justify or explain to her any sort of abruptly or even bizarrely sudden major decision they might happen to make, and it's not clear that The Mad Stork had even nailed down the fact that Orin was still in metro-Boston at B.U. in the first place, but Orin still felt the move demanded some kind of explanation - was that fall tennis practice had started and he'd discovered that he was an empty withered psychic husk, compet.i.tively, burned out. Orin had been playing, eating, sleeping, and excreting compet.i.tive tennis since his racquet was bigger than he was. He said he realized he had at eighteen become exactly as fine a tennis player as he was ever destined to be. The prospect of further improvement, a crucial carrot that Scht.i.tt and the E.T.A. staff were expert at dangling, had disappeared at a fourth-rate tennis program whose coach had a poster of Bill Tilden in his office and offered critique on the level of Bend Your Knees and Watch The Ball. This was all actually true, the burn-out part, and totally swallowable as far as the from-tennis- part went, but Orin had a harder time explaining the decision's -to-football component, partly because he had only the vaguest understanding of U.S. football's rules, tactics, and nonmetric venue; he had in fact never once even touched a real pebbled-leather football before and, like most serious tennis players, had always found the misshapen ball's schizoid bounces disorienting and upsetting to look at. In fact the decision had very little to do with football at all, or with the reason Orin ended up starting to give before Avril all but demanded that he stop feeling in any way pressured or compelled to do anything more than ask for their utter and unqualified support of whatever actions he felt his personal happiness required, which is what she did when he started a slightly lyrical thing about the crash of pads and Sisboomba of Pep Squad and ambience of male bonding and smell of dewy turf at Nickerson Field at dawn when he showed up to watch the sprinklers come on and turn the lemon-wedge of risen sun into plumed rainbows of refraction. The refracting-sprinklers part was actually true, and that he liked it; the rest had been fiction.

The real football reason, in all its inevitable real-reason ba.n.a.lity, was that, over the course of weeks of dawns of watching the autosprinklers and the Pep Squad (which really did practice at dawn) practices, Orin had developed a horrible schoolboy-grade crush, complete with dilated pupils and weak knees, for a certain big-haired soph.o.m.ore baton-twirler he watched twirl and strut from a distance through the diffracted spectrum of the plumed sprinklers, all the way across the field's dewy turf, a twirler who'd attended a few of the All-Athletic-Team mixers Orin and his strabismic B.U. doubles partner had gone to, and who danced the same way she twirled and invoked ma.s.s Pep, which is to say in a way that seemed to turn everything solid in Orin's body watery and distant and oddly refracted.

Orin Incandenza, who like many children of raging alcoholics and OCD-sufferers had internal addictive-s.e.xuality issues, had already drawn idle little sideways 8's on the postcoital flanks of a dozen B.U. coeds. But this was different. He'd been smitten before, but not decapitated. He lay on his bed in the autumn P.M.s during the tennis coach's required nap-time, squeezing a tennis ball and talking for hours about this twirling sprinkler-obscured soph.o.m.ore while his doubles partner lay way on the other side of the huge bed looking simultaneously at Orin and at the N.E. leaves changing color in the trees outside the window. The schoolboy epithet they'd made up to refer to Orin's twirler was the P.G.O.A.T., for the Prettiest Girl Of All Time. It wasn't the entire attraction, but she really was almost grotesquely lovely. She made the Moms look like the sort of piece of fruit you think you want to take out of the bin and but then once you're right there over the bin you put back because from close up you can see a much fresher and less preserved-seeming piece of fruit elsewhere in the bin. The twirler was so pretty that not even the senior B.U. football Terriers could summon the saliva to speak to her at Athletic mixers. In fact she was almost universally shunned. The twirler induced in heteros.e.xual males what U.H.I.D. later told her was termed the Actaeon Complex, which is a kind of deep phylogenic fear of transhuman beauty. About all Orin's doubles partner - who as a strabismic was something of an expert on female unattainability - felt he could do was warn O. that this was the kind of hideously attractive girl you just knew in advance did not a.s.sociate with normal collegiate human males, and clearly attended B.U.-Athletic social functions only out of a sort of bland scientific interest while she waited for the cleft-chinned ascapartic male-model-looking wildly-successful-in-business adult male she doubtless was involved with to telephone her from the back seat of his green stretch Infiniti, etc. No major-sport player had ever even orbited in close enough to hear the elisions and apical lapses of a mid-Southern accent in her oddly flat but resonant voice that sounded like someone enunciating very carefully inside a soundproof enclosure. When she danced, at dances, it was with other cheerleaders and twirlers and Pep Squad Terrierettes, because no male had the grit or spit to ask her. Orin himself couldn't get closer than four meters at parties, because he suddenly couldn't figure out where to put the stresses in the Charles-Tavis-unwittingly-inspired 'Describe-the-sort-of-man - you - find - attractive - and - I'll - affect - the - demeanor - of - that - sort - of - man' strategic opening that had worked so well on other B.U. Subjects. It took three hearings for him to figure out that her name wasn't Joel. The big hair was red-gold and the skin peachy-tinged pale and arms freckled and zygomatics indescribable and her eyes an extra-natural HD green. He wouldn't learn till later that the almost pungently clean line-dried-laundry scent that hung about her was a special low-pH dandelion attar decocted special by her chemist Daddy in s.h.i.+ny Prize KY.

Boston University's tennis team, needless to say, had neither cheerleaders nor baton-twirling Pep Squads, which were reserved for major and large-crowd sports. This is pretty understandable.

The tennis coach took Orin's decision hard, and Orin had had to hand him a Kleenex and stand there for several minutes under the poster of an avuncular Big Bill Tilden standing there in WWII-era long white pants and ruffling a ballboy's hair, Orin watching the Kleenex soggify and get holes blown through it while he tried to articulate just what he meant by burned out burned out and and withered husk withered huskand carrot carrot. The coach had kept asking if this meant Orin's mother wouldn't be coming down to watch practice anymore.

Orin's now former doubles partner, a strabismic and f.a.ggy-sweatered but basically decent guy who also happened to be heir to the Nickerson Farms Meat Facsmile fortune, had his cleft-chinned and solidly B.U.-connected Dad make 'a couple quick calls' from the back seat of his forest-green Lexus. B.U.'s Head Football Coach, the Boss Terrier, an exiled Oklahoman who really did wear a gray crewneck sweats.h.i.+rt with a whistle on a string, was intrigued by the size of the left forearm and hand extended (impolitely but intriguingly) during introductions - this was Orin's tennis arm, roughly churn-sized; the other, whose dimensions were human, was hidden under a sportcoat draped strategically over the aspiring walk-on's right shoulder.

But you can't play U.S. football with a draped sportcoat. And Orin's only real speed was in tiny three-meter lateral bursts. And then it turned out that the idea of actually making direct physical contact with an opponent was so deeply ingrained as alien and horrific that Orin's tryouts, even at reserve positions, were too pathetic to describe. He was called a draga.s.s draga.s.s and then a and then a mollygag mollygag and then a and then a bona fried p.u.s.s.y. bona fried p.u.s.s.y.He was finally told that he seemed to have some kind of empty swinging sack where his b.a.l.l.s ought to be and that if he wanted to keep his scholars.h.i.+p he might ought to stick to minor-type sports where what you hit didn't up and hit you back. The Coach finally actually grabbed Orin's facemask and pointed to the mouth of the field's southern tunnel. Orin walked south off the field solo and disconsolate, helmet under his little right arm, with not even a wistful glance back at the Pep Squad's P.G.O.A.T. practicing baton-aloft splits in a heart-rendingly distant way beneath the Visitors' northern goalposts.

What metro Boston AAs are trite but correct about is that both destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps ill.u.s.trate an individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: 100 100 i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst Psst that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer. The destiny-grade event that happened to Orin Incandenza at this point was that just as he was pa.s.sing glumly under the Home goalposts and entering the shadow of the south exit-tunnel's adit a loud and ominously orthopedic cracking sound, plus then shrieking, issued from somewhere on the field behind him. What had happened was that B.U.'s best defensive tackle - a 180-kilo future pro who had no teeth and liked to color - practicing Special Teams punt-rushes, not only blocked B.U.'s varsity punter's kick but committed a serious mental error and kept coming and crashed into the little padless guy while the punter's cleated foot was still up over his head, falling on him in a beefy heap and snapping everything from femur to tarsus in the punter's leg with a dreadful high-caliber snap. Two Pep majorettes and a waterboy fainted from the sound of the punter's screams alone. The blocked punt's ball caromed hard off the defensive tackle's helmet and bounced crazily and rolled untended all the way back to the shadow of the south tunnel, where Orin had turned to watch the punter writhe and the lineman rise with a finger in his mouth and a guilty expression. The Defensive Line Coach disconnected his headset and dashed out and began blowing his whistle at the lineman at extremely close range, over and over, as the huge tackle started to cry and hit himself in the forehead with the heel of his hand. Since n.o.body else was close, Orin picked up the blocked punt's ball, which the Head Coach was gesturing impatiently for from his position at the midfield bench. Orin held the football (which he'd not been very good at it during tryouts, holding onto it), feeling its weird oval weight, and looked way upfield at the stretcher-bearers and punter and a.s.sistants and Coach. It was too far to try to throw, and there was just no way Orin was making another solo walk up the sideline and then back off the field again under the distant green gaze of the twirler who owned his CNS. that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer. The destiny-grade event that happened to Orin Incandenza at this point was that just as he was pa.s.sing glumly under the Home goalposts and entering the shadow of the south exit-tunnel's adit a loud and ominously orthopedic cracking sound, plus then shrieking, issued from somewhere on the field behind him. What had happened was that B.U.'s best defensive tackle - a 180-kilo future pro who had no teeth and liked to color - practicing Special Teams punt-rushes, not only blocked B.U.'s varsity punter's kick but committed a serious mental error and kept coming and crashed into the little padless guy while the punter's cleated foot was still up over his head, falling on him in a beefy heap and snapping everything from femur to tarsus in the punter's leg with a dreadful high-caliber snap. Two Pep majorettes and a waterboy fainted from the sound of the punter's screams alone. The blocked punt's ball caromed hard off the defensive tackle's helmet and bounced crazily and rolled untended all the way back to the shadow of the south tunnel, where Orin had turned to watch the punter writhe and the lineman rise with a finger in his mouth and a guilty expression. The Defensive Line Coach disconnected his headset and dashed out and began blowing his whistle at the lineman at extremely close range, over and over, as the huge tackle started to cry and hit himself in the forehead with the heel of his hand. Since n.o.body else was close, Orin picked up the blocked punt's ball, which the Head Coach was gesturing impatiently for from his position at the midfield bench. Orin held the football (which he'd not been very good at it during tryouts, holding onto it), feeling its weird oval weight, and looked way upfield at the stretcher-bearers and punter and a.s.sistants and Coach. It was too far to try to throw, and there was just no way Orin was making another solo walk up the sideline and then back off the field again under the distant green gaze of the twirler who owned his CNS.

Orin, before that seminal moment, had never tried to kick any sort of ball before in his whole life, was the unengineered and kind of vulnerable revelation that ended up moving Joelle van Dyne way more than status or hang-time.

And but as of that moment, as whistles fell from lips and people pointed, and under that same green and sprinkler-hazed gaze Orin found for himself, within compet.i.tive U.S. football, a new niche and carrot. A Show-type career he could never have dreamed of trying to engineer. Within days he was punting 60 yards without a rush, practicing solo on an outside field with the Special Teams a.s.sistant, a dreamy Gauloise-smoking man who invoked ideas of sky and flight and called Orin 'ephebe,' which a discreet phone call to his youngest brother revealed not to be the insult Orin had feared it sounded like. By the second week O. was up around 65 yards, still without a snap or rush, his rhythm clean and faultless, his concentration on the transaction between one foot and one leather egg almost frighteningly total. Nor, by the third week, was he much distracted by the ten crazed pituitary giants bearing down as he took the snap and stepped forward, the gasps and crunching and meaty splats of interpersonal contact around him, the cooly-type shuffle of the stretcher-bearers who came and went after the whistles blew. He'd been taken aside and the empty-s.c.r.o.t.u.m crack apologized for, and it had been explained - complete with blow-ups of Rulebook pages - that regulations against direct physical contact with the punter were draconian, enforced by the threat of ma.s.sive yardage and loss of possession. The rifle-shot sounds of the ex-punter's now useless leg were one-in-a-million sounds, he was a.s.sured. The Head Coach let Orin overhear him telling the defense that any man misfortunate enough to impact the team's new stellar punt-man might could just keep on walking after the play was over, all the way to the south tunnel and the stadium exit and the nearest transportation to some other inst.i.tution of learning and ball.

It was, pretty obviously, the start of football season. Crisp air, everything half dead, burning leaves, hot chocolate, racc.o.o.n coats and halftime-twirling and something called the Wave. Crowds exponentially larger and more demonstrative than tennis-tournament crowds. HOME v. SUNYBuffalo, HOME v. Syracuse, AT Boston College, AT Rhode Island, HOME v. the despised Minutemen of UMa.s.sAmherst. Orin's average reached 69 yards per kick and was still improving, his eyes fixed on the twin inducements of a gleaming baton and a ma.s.sive developmental carrot he hadn't felt since age fourteen. He punted the football better and better as his motion - a dancerly combination of moves and weight-transfers every bit as complex and precise as a kick serve - got more instinctive and he found his ham-strings and adductors loosening through constant and high-impact compet.i.tive punting, his left cleat finis.h.i.+ng at 90 to the turf, knee to his nose, Rockette-kicking in the midst of crowd-noise so rabid and entire it seemed to remove stadiums' air, the one huge wordless o.r.g.a.s.mic voice rising and creating a vacuum that sucked the ball after it into the sky, the leather egg receding as it climbed in a perfect spiral, seeming to chase the very crowd-roar it had produced.

By Halloween his control was even better than his distance. It wasn't by accident that the Special Teams a.s.sistant described it as 'touch.' Consider that a football field is basically just a gra.s.s tennis court tugged unnaturally long, and that white lines at complex right angles still define tactics and movement, the very possibility of play. And that Orin Incandenza, who tennis-historically had had mediocre pa.s.sing shots, had been indicted by Scht.i.tt for depending way too often on the lob he'd developed as compensation. Like the equally weak-pa.s.sing Eschaton-prodigy Michael Pemulis after him, Orin's whole limited game had been built around a preternatural lob, which of course a lob is just a higher-than-opponent parabola that ideally lands just shy of the area of play's rear boundary and is hard to retrieve and return. Gerhardt Scht.i.tt and deLint and their depressed prorectors had had to sit eating b.u.t.terless popcorn through only one cartridge of one B.U. game to understand how Orin had found his major-sport niche. Orin was still just only lobbing, Scht.i.tt observed, ill.u.s.trating with the pointer and a multiple-replayed fourth down, but now with the leg instead, the only punting, and now with ten armored and testosterone-flushed factota to deal with what ever return an opponent could muster; Scht.i.tt posited that Orin had stumbled by accident on a way, in this grotesquely physical and territorial U.S. game, to legitimate the same dependency on the one shot of lob that had kept him from developing the courage to develop his weaker areas, which this unwillingness to risk the temporary failure and weakness for long-term gaining had been the real herbicide on the carrot of Orin Incandenza's tennis. p.u.b.erty Schmuberty, Schmuberty, as the real reason for burning down the inside fire for tennis, Scht.i.tt knew. Scht.i.tt's remarks were nodded vigorously at and largely ignored, in the Viewing Room. Scht.i.tt later told deLint he had several very bad feelings about Orin's future, inside. as the real reason for burning down the inside fire for tennis, Scht.i.tt knew. Scht.i.tt's remarks were nodded vigorously at and largely ignored, in the Viewing Room. Scht.i.tt later told deLint he had several very bad feelings about Orin's future, inside.

But so by freshman Halloween Orin was regularly placing his punts inside the opponents' 20, spinning the ball off his cleats' laces so it either hit and squiggled outside the white sideline and out of play or else landed on its point and bounced straight up and seemed to squat in the air, hovering and spinning, waiting for some downfield Terrier to kill it just by touching. The Special Teams a.s.sistant told Orin that these were historically called coffin-corner kicks, and that Orin Incandenza was the best natural coffin-corner man he'd lived to see. You almost had to smile. Orin's Full-Ride scholars.h.i.+p was renewed under the aegis of a brutaler but way more popular North American sport than compet.i.tive tennis. This was after the second home game, around the time that a certain Actaeonizingly pretty baton-twirler, invoking ma.s.s Pep during breaks in the action, seemed to begin somehow directing her glittering sideline routines at Orin in particular. So and then the only really cardiac-grade romantic relations.h.i.+p of Orin's life took bilateral root at a distance, during games, without one exchanged personal phoneme, a love communicated - across gra.s.sy expanses, against stadiums' monovocal roar - entirely through stylized repet.i.tive motions - his functional, hers celebratory - their respective little dances of devotion to the spectacle they were both - in their different roles - trying to make as entertaining as possible.

But so the point was that the accuracy came after the distance. In his first couple games Orin had approached his fourth-down task as one of simply kicking the ball out of sight and past hope of return. The dreamy S.T. a.s.sistant said this was a punter's natural pattern of growth and development. Your raw force tends to precede your control. In his initial Home start, wearing a padless uniform that didn't fit and a wide receiver's number, he was summoned when B.U.'s first drive stalled on the 40 of a Syracuse team that had no idea it was in its last season of representing an American university. A side-issue. College-sport a.n.a.lysts would later use the game to contrast the beginning and end of different eras. But a side-issue. Orin had a book-long of 73 yards that day, and an average hang of eight-point-something seconds; but that first official punt, exhilarated - the carrot, the P.G.O.A.T., the monovocal roar of a major-sport crowd - he sent over the head of the Orangeman back waiting to receive it, over the goalposts and the safety-nets behind the goalposts, over the first three sections of seats and into the lap of an Emeritus theology prof in Row 52 who'd needed opera gla.s.ses to make out the play itself. It went in the books at 40 yards, that baptismal compet.i.tive punt. It was really almost a 90-yard punt, and had the sort of hang-time the Special Teams a.s.st. said you could have tender and sensitive intercourse during. The sound of the podiatric impact had silenced a major-sport crowd, and a retired USMC flier who always came with petroleum-jelly samples he hawked to the knuckle-chapped crowds in the Nickerson stands told his cronies in a Brookline watering hole after the game that this Incandenza kid's first public punt had sounded just the way Rolling Thunder's big-bellied Berthas had sounded, the exaggerated WHUMP of incendiary tonnage, way larger than life.

After four weeks, Orin's success at kicking big egg-shaped b.a.l.l.s was way past anything he'd accomplished hitting little round ones. Granted, the tennis and Eschaton hadn't hurt. But it wasn't all athletic, this affinity for the public punt. It wasn't all just high-level compet.i.tive training and high-pressure experience transported inter-sport. He told Joelle van Dyne, she of the accent and baton and brainlocking beauty, told her in the course of an increasingly revealing conversation after kind of amazingly she she had approached had approached him him at a Columbus Day Major Sport function and asked him to autograph a squooshy-sided football he'd kicked a hole through in practice - the deflated bladder had landed in the Marching Terriers' sousaphone player's sousaphone and had been handed over to Joelle after extrication by the lardy tubist, sweaty and dumb under the girl's Actaeonizingly imploring gaze - asked him - Orin now also suddenly damp and blank on anything attractive to say or recite - asked him in an emptily resonant drawl to inscribe the punctured thing for her Own Personal Daddy, one Joe Lon van Dyne of s.h.i.+ny Prize KY and she said also of the Dyne-Riney Proton Donor Reagent Corp. of nearby Boaz KY, and engaged him (O.) in a slowly decreasingly one-sided social-function-type conversation - the P.G.O.A.T. was pretty easy to stay in a one-to-one like tete-a-tete with, since no other Terrier could bring himself within four meters of her - and Orin gradually found himself almost meeting her eye as he shared that he believed it wasn't all athletic, punting's pull for him, that a lot of it seemed emotional and/or even, if there was such a thing anymore, spiritual: a denial of silence: here were upwards of 30,000 voices, souls, voicing approval as One Soul. He invoked the raw numbers. The frenzy. He was thinking out loud here. Audience exhortations and approvals so total they ceased to be numerically distinct and melded into a sort of single coital moan, one big vowel, the sound of the womb, the roar gathering, tidal, amniotic, the voice of what might as well be G.o.d. None of tennis's prim applause cut short by an umpire's patrician shush. He said he was just speculating here, ad-libbing; he was meeting her eye and not drowning, his dread now transformed into whatever it had been dread of. He said the sound of all those souls as One Sound, too loud to bear, building, waiting for his foot to release it: Orin said the thing he thought he liked was he literally could not hear himself think out there, maybe a cliche, but out there transformed, his own self transcended as he'd never escaped himself on the court, a sense of a presence in the sky, the crowd-sound congregational, the stadium-shaking climax as the ball climbed and inscribed a cathedran arch, seeming to take forever to fall. ... It never even occurred to him to ask her what sort of demeanor she preferred. He didn't have to strategize or even scheme. Later he knew what the dread had been dread of. He hadn't had to promise her anything, it turned out. It was all for free. at a Columbus Day Major Sport function and asked him to autograph a squooshy-sided football he'd kicked a hole through in practice - the deflated bladder had landed in the Marching Terriers' sousaphone player's sousaphone and had been handed over to Joelle after extrication by the lardy tubist, sweaty and dumb under the girl's Actaeonizingly imploring gaze - asked him - Orin now also suddenly damp and blank on anything attractive to say or recite - asked him in an emptily resonant drawl to inscribe the punctured thing for her Own Personal Daddy, one Joe Lon van Dyne of s.h.i.+ny Prize KY and she said also of the Dyne-Riney Proton Donor Reagent Corp. of nearby Boaz KY, and engaged him (O.) in a slowly decreasingly one-sided social-function-type conversation - the P.G.O.A.T. was pretty easy to stay in a one-to-one like tete-a-tete with, since no other Terrier could bring himself within four meters of her - and Orin gradually found himself almost meeting her eye as he shared that he believed it wasn't all athletic, punting's pull for him, that a lot of it seemed emotional and/or even, if there was such a thing anymore, spiritual: a denial of silence: here were upwards of 30,000 voices, souls, voicing approval as One Soul. He invoked the raw numbers. The frenzy. He was thinking out loud here. Audience exhortations and approvals so total they ceased to be numerically distinct and melded into a sort of single coital moan, one big vowel, the sound of the womb, the roar gathering, tidal, amniotic, the voice of what might as well be G.o.d. None of tennis's prim applause cut short by an umpire's patrician shush. He said he was just speculating here, ad-libbing; he was meeting her eye and not drowning, his dread now transformed into whatever it had been dread of. He said the sound of all those souls as One Sound, too loud to bear, building, waiting for his foot to release it: Orin said the thing he thought he liked was he literally could not hear himself think out there, maybe a cliche, but out there transformed, his own self transcended as he'd never escaped himself on the court, a sense of a presence in the sky, the crowd-sound congregational, the stadium-shaking climax as the ball climbed and inscribed a cathedran arch, seeming to take forever to fall. ... It never even occurred to him to ask her what sort of demeanor she preferred. He didn't have to strategize or even scheme. Later he knew what the dread had been dread of. He hadn't had to promise her anything, it turned out. It was all for free.

By the end of his freshman fall and B.U.'s champions.h.i.+p of the Yankee Conference, plus its nonvictorious but still unprecedented appearance at Las Vegas's dignitary-attended K-L-RMKI/Forsythia Bowl, Orin had taken his off-campus housing subsidy and moved with Joelle van Dyne the heart-stopping Kentuckian into an East Cambridge co-op three subway stops distant from B.U. and the all-new inconveniences of being publicly stellar at a major sport in a city where people beat each other to death in bars over stats and fealty.

Joelle had done the midnight Thanksgiving dinner at E.T.A., and survived Avril, and then Orin spent his first Xmas ever away from home, flying to Paducah and then driving a rented 4WD to kudzu-hung s.h.i.+ny Prize, Kentucky, to drink toddies under a little white reusable Xmas tree with all red b.a.l.l.s with Joelle and her mother and Personal Daddy and his loyal pointers, getting a storm-cellar tour of Joe Lon's incredible Pyrex collection of every solution in the known world that can turn blue litmus paper red, little red rectangles floating in the flasks for proof, Orin nodding a lot and trying incredibly hard and Joelle saying that Mr. van D.'s not once smiling at him was just His Way, was all, the way his own Moms had Her Way Joelle'd had trouble with. Orin wired Marlon Bain and Ross Reat and the strabismic Nickerson that he was by all indications in love with somebody.

Freshman New Year's Eve in s.h.i.+ny Prize, far from the O.N.A.N.ite upheavals of the new Northeast, the last P.M P.M. Before Subsidization, was the first time Orin saw Joelle ingest very small amounts of cocaine. Orin had exited his own substance-phase about the time he discovered s.e.x, plus of course the N./O.N.A.N.C.A.A.-urine considerations, and he declined it, the cocaine, but not in a judgmental or killjoy way, and found he liked being with his P.G.O.A.T. straight while she ingested, he found it exciting, a vicariously on-the-edge feeling he a.s.sociated with giving yourself not to any one game's definition but to yourself and how you unjudgmentally feel about somebody who's high and feeling even freer and better than normal, with you, alone, under the red b.a.l.l.s. They were a natural match here: her ingestion then was recreational, and he not only didn't mind but never made a show of not minding, nor she that he abstained; the whole substance issue was natural and kind of free. Another reason they seemed star-fated was that Joelle had in her soph.o.m.ore year decided to concentrate in Film/Cartridge, academically, at B.U. Either Film-Cartridge Theory or Film-Cartridge Production. Or maybe both. The P.G.O.A.T. was a film fanatic, though her tastes were pretty corporate: she told O. she preferred movies where 'a whole bunch of s.h.i.+t blows up.' 101 101 Orin in a low-key way introduced her to art film, conceptual and highbrow academic avant- and apres-garde film, and taught her how to use some of InterLace's more esoteric menus. He blasted up the hill to Enfield and brought down The Mad Stork's own Orin in a low-key way introduced her to art film, conceptual and highbrow academic avant- and apres-garde film, and taught her how to use some of InterLace's more esoteric menus. He blasted up the hill to Enfield and brought down The Mad Stork's own Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and h.e.l.l, Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and h.e.l.l,which had a major impact on her. Right after Thanksgiving Himself let the P.G.O.A.T. understudy with Leith on the set of The American Century as Seen Through a Brick The American Century as Seen Through a Brickin return for getting to film her thumb against a plucked string. After an only mildly disappointing soph.o.m.ore season O. flew with her to Toronto to watch part of the filming of Blood Sister: One Tough Nun. Blood Sister: One Tough Nun.Himself would take Orin and his beloved out after dailies, entertaining Joelle with his freakish gift for Canadian-cab-hailing while Orin stood turtle-headed in his topcoat; and then later Orin would shepherd the two of them back to their Ontario Place hotel, stopping the cab to let them both throw up, fireman-carrying Joelle while he watched The Mad Stork negotiate his suite by holding on to walls. Himself showed them the U. Toronto Conference Center where he and the Moms had first met. This might have been the end's start, gradually, in hindsight. Joelle that summer declined a sixth summer at the Dixie Baton-Twirling Inst.i.tute in Oxford MS and let Himself give her a stage name and use her in rapid succession in Low Temperature Civics, (The) Desire to Desire, Low Temperature Civics, (The) Desire to Desire,and Safe Boating Is No Accident, Safe Boating Is No Accident, travelling with Himself and Mario while Orin stayed in Boston recuperating from minor surgery on a hypertrophied left quadriceps at a Ma.s.sachusetts General Hospital where no fewer than four nurses and P.T.s in the Sports Medicine wing filed for legal separation from their husbands, with custody. travelling with Himself and Mario while Orin stayed in Boston recuperating from minor surgery on a hypertrophied left quadriceps at a Ma.s.sachusetts General Hospital where no fewer than four nurses and P.T.s in the Sports Medicine wing filed for legal separation from their husbands, with custody.

The P.G.O.A.T.'s real ambitions weren't thespian, Orin knew, is one reason he hung in so long. Joelle when he'd met her already owned some modest personal film equipment, courtesy of her Personal Daddy. And she now had access to nothing if not serious digital gear. By Orin's soph.o.m.ore year she no longer twirled or incited Pep in any way. In his first full season she stood behind various white lines with a little Bolex R32 digital recorder and BTL meters and lenses, including a b.i.t.c.hing Angenieux zoom O.'d gone and paid for, as a gesture, and she shot little half-disk-sector clips of #78, B.U. Punter, sometimes with Leith in attendance (never Himself), experimenting with speed and focal length and digital mattes, extending herself technically. Orin, despite his interests in upgrading the P.G.O.A.T.'s commercial tastes, was himself pretty luke-warm on film and cartridges and theater and pretty much anything that reduced him to herd-like spectation, but he respected Joelle's own creative drives, to an extent; and he found out that he really did like watching the football footage of Joelle van Dyne, featuring pretty much him only, strongly preferred the little .5-sector clips to Himself's cartridges or corporate films where things blew up while Joelle bounced in her seat and pointed at the viewer; and he found them (her clips of him at play) way more engaging than the grainy overcluttered game- and play-celluloids the Head Coach made everybody sit through. Orin liked to adjust the co-op's rheostat way down when Joelle wasn't home and haul out the diskettes and make Jiffy Pop and watch her little ten-second clips of him over and over. He saw something different each time he rewound, something more. The clips of him punting unfolded like time-lapsing flowers and seemed to reveal him in ways he could never have engineered. He sat rapt. It only happened when he watched them alone. Sometimes he got an erection. He never m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.ed; Joelle came home. Still in the last stages of a late p.u.b.erty and the prettiness getting visibly worse day by day, Joelle had been maiden, still, when Orin met her. She'd been shunned theretofore, both at B.U. and s.h.i.+ny PrizeBoaz Consolidated: the beauty had repelled every comer. She'd devoted her life to her twirling and amateur film. Disney Leith said she had the knack: her camera-hand was rock-steady; even the early clips from the start of the Y.W. season looked shot off a tripod. There'd been no audio in the soph.o.m.ore clips, and you could hear the high-pitched noise of the cartridge in the TP's disk drive. A cartridge revolving at a digital diskette's 450 rpm sounds a bit like a distant vacuum cleaner. Late-night car-noises and sirens drifted in through the bars from as far away as the Storrow 500. Silence was not part of what Orin was after, watching. (Joelle housekeeps like a fiend. The place is always sterile. The resemblance to the Moms's housekeeping he finds a bit creepy. Except Joelle doesn't mind a mess or give anybody the creeps worrying about hiding that she minds it so n.o.body's feelings will be hurt. With Joelle the mess just disappears sometime during the night and you wake up and the place is sterile. It's like elves.) Soon after he started watching the clips in his junior year, Orin had blasted up Comm.'s hill and brought Joelle back a Bolex-compatible Tatsuoka recorder w/ sync pulse, a cardioid mike, a low-end tripod w/ a barney to m.u.f.fle the Bolex's whir, a cla.s.sy Pilotone blooper and sync-pulse cords, a whole auracopia. It took Leith three weeks to teach her to use the Pilotone. Now the clips had sound. Orin has trouble not burning the Jiffy Pop popcorn. It tends to burn as the foil top inflates; you have to take it off the stove before the foil forms a dome. No microwave popcorn for Orin, even then. He liked to dim the track-lights when Joelle was out and haul out the cartridge-rack and watch her little ten-second clips of his punts over and over. Here he is back against Delaware in the second Home game of Y.T.M.P. The sky is dull and pale, the five Yankee Conference flags - U. Vermont and UNH now history - are all right out straight with the gale off the Charles for which Nickerson Field is infamous. It's fourth down, obviously. Thousands of kilos of padded meat a.s.sume four-point stances and chuff at each other, poised to charge and stave. Orin is twelve yards back from scrimmage, his cleated feet together, his weight just ahead of himself, his mismatched arms out before him in the att.i.tude of the blind before walls. His eyes are fixed on the distant gra.s.s-stained Valentine of the center's a.s.s. His stance, waiting to receive the snap, is not unlike a diver's, he sees. Nine men on line, four-pointed, poised to stave off ten men's a.s.sault. The other team's deep back is back to receive, seventy yards away or more. The fullback whose sole job is to keep Orin from harm is ahead and to the left, bent at the knees, his taped fists together and elbows out like a winged thing ready to hurl itself at whatever breaches the line and comes at the punter. Joelle's equipment isn't quite pro-caliber but her technique is very good. By junior year there's also color. There's only one sound, and it is utter: the crowd's noise and its response to that noise, building. Orin's back against Delaware, ready, his helmet a bright noncontact white and his head's insides scrubbed free for ten seconds of every thought not connected to receiving the long snap and stepping martially forward to lob the leather egg beyond sight at an a