Infinite Jest Part 33

'Secyotty I said I said halt! halt!'

Green and Lenz bending in, white breath all over and Green's dripping nose the same copper smell as Lenz.

'I knew I knew you,' Gately says to Joelle, whose veil remains inscrutable.

'If I could ask you to specify halt from what.'

'Get his back up here first,' Green tells Lenz.

'Not crazy about all this blood,' Lenz is saying.

Many hands slide under his back; the shoulder blooms with colorless fire. The sky looks so 3-D you could like dive in. The stars distend and sprout spikes. Joelle's warm legs s.h.i.+ft with her weight to keep pressure on the pad. The squis.h.i.+ng sound Gately knows means the robe's soaked through. He wants somebody to congratulate him for not having thrown up. You can tell some of the stars are nearer and some far, down there. What Gately's always thought of as the Big Question Mark is really the Big Dipper.

'I'm oddering oddering desist until who's in chahge that I can repot the si desist until who's in chahge that I can repot the sichation.' The Security guy's hammered, his name's Sidney or Stanley and he wears his Security-hat and baton shopping in the Purity Supreme and always asks Gately how it's hanging. His shoes' uppers are blasted along the feet's insides the way fat men that have to walk a lot's are; his ex-ballplayer's collops and big hanging gut are one of Gately's great motivators for nightly situps. Gately turns his head to throw up a little on both Green and Joelle, who both ignore it.

'Oh sorry. Oh s.h.i.+t I hate that.'

Joelle v.D. runs a hand down Gately's wet arm that leaves a warm wake, the hand, and then gently squeezes as much of the wrist as she can get her hand around. 'And Lo,' she says softly.

'Jesus his leg's all b.l.o.o.d.y too.'

'Boy do I know guys loved that show you did.' A tiny bit more throwing up.

'Now we're going to lift him very gently and get the feet under.'

'Here Green man get over here on the south why don't you.'

'I'm oddering the whole sitchation halt it right right thaah whey thaah whey aah aah.'

Lenz and Green's shoes coming together and moving apart at either side of Gately, faces coming down in a fish-eye lens, lifting: 'Ready?'

Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment: InterLace TelEntertainment, 932/1864 R.I.S.C. power-TPs w/ or w/o console, Pink2, post-Primestar D.S.S. dissemination, menus and icons, pixel-free InterNet Fax, tri- and quad-modems w/ adjustable baud, post-Web Dissemination-Grids, screens so high-def you might as well be there, cost-effective videophonic conferencing, internal Froxx CD-ROM, electronic couture, all-in-one consoles, Yus.h.i.+tyu ceramic nanoprocessors, laser chromatography, Virtual-capable media-cards, fiber-optic pulse, digital encoding, killer apps; carpal neuralgia, phosphenic migraine, gluteal hyperadiposity, lumbar stressae. Half of all metro Bostonians now work at home via some digital link. 50% of all public education disseminated through accredited encoded pulses, absorbable at home on couches. Ms. Tawni Kondo's immensely popular exercise program spontaneously disseminated daily in all three O.N.A.N. time zones at 0700h., a combination of low-impact aerobics, Canadian Air Force calisthenics, and what might be termed 'cosmetic psychology' - upwards of 60 million North Americans daily kicking and genuflecting with Tawni Kondo, a ma.s.s ch.o.r.eography somewhat similar to those compulsory A.M. tai chi slo-mo exercise a.s.semblies in post-Mao China - except that the Chinese a.s.semble publicly together. One-third of those 50% of metro Bostonians who still leave home to work could work at home if they wished. And (get this) 94% of all O.N.A.N.ite paid entertainment now absorbed at home: pulses, storage cartridges, digital displays, domestic decor - an entertainment-market of sofas and eyes.

Saying this is bad is like saying traffic is bad, or health-care surtaxes, or the hazards of annular fusion: n.o.body but Ludditic granola-crunching freaks would call bad what no one can imagine being without.

But so very much private watching of customized screens behind drawn curtains in the dreamy familiarity of home. A floating no-s.p.a.ce world of personal spectation. Whole new millennial era, under Gentle and Lace-Forche. Total freedom, privacy, choice.

Hence the new millennium's pa.s.sion for standing live witness to things. A whole sub-rosa schedule of public spectation opportunities, 'spect-ops,' the priceless chance to be part of a live crowd, watching. Thus the Gapers' Blocks at traffic accidents, sewer-gas explosions, muggings, purse-s.n.a.t.c.hings, the occasional Empire W.D.V. with an incomplete vector splatting into North Sh.o.r.e suburbs and planned communities and people leaving their front doors agape in their rush to get out and mill around and spectate at the circle of impacted waste drawing sober and studious crowds, milling in rings around the impact, earnestly comparing mental notes on just what it is they all see. Hence the apotheosis and intricate pecking-order of Boston street musicians, the best of whom now commute to work in foreign autos. The nightly chance to crank back the drapes and face out into the streets at 0000h., when all street-parked vehicles have to switch sides and everyone goes nuts and mills, either switching or watching. Street fights, supermarket-checkout confrontations, tax-auctions, speeders stopped for ticketing, coprolaliac Touretters on downtown corners, all drawing liquid crowds. The fellows.h.i.+p and anonymous communion of being part of a watching crowd, a ma.s.s of eyes all not at home, all out in the world and pointed the same way. Q.v. the crowd-control headaches at crime-scenes, fires, demonstrations, rallies, marches, displays of Canadian insurgency; crowds brought together now so quickly, too quickly even to see them, a kind of visual inversion of watching something melt, the crowds collect and are held tight by an almost seemingly nucleic force, watching together. Almost anything can do it. Street vendors are back. Homeless vets and twisted figures in wheelchairs with hand-lettered signs outlining ent.i.tlement. Jugglers, freaks, magicians, mimes, charismatic preachers with portable PAs. Hardcore pan-handlers stem like they're selling nostrums to small crowds; the best pan-handling now verges on stand-up comedy, and is rewarded by watching crowds. Cultists in saffron with much percussion and laser-jet leaflets. Even some old-style Eurobeggars, black-browed persons in striped leggings, mute and aloof. Even local candidates, activists, advocates and gra.s.s-roots aides have returned full-circle to the public stump - the bunting-hung platform, the dumpster-lid, vehicles' roofs, awnings, anything overhead, anything raised to a crowd-collecting public view: people climb and declaim, drawing crowds.

One top Back Bay public spect-op every November is watching expressionless men in federal white and munic.i.p.al cadet-blue drain and scrub the Public Gardens' man-made duck pond for the upcoming winter. They drain it sometime in November every year. It's publicly unannounced; there's no fixed schedule; long s.h.i.+ny trucks just all of a sudden appear in a ring at pond's rim; it's always a weekday c. mid-November; it's also always somehow a gray raw sad windy Boston day, gulls cartwheeling in a sky the color of dirty gla.s.s, people m.u.f.flered and with new gloves on. Not your ideal sylvan-type day for conventional lounging or public spectation. But a ma.s.sive crowd always collects and thickens in a dense ring along the banks of the Public Gardens' pond. The pond has ducks. The pond is perfectly round, its surface roughened to elephant skin by the wind, geometrically round and banked with lawn-quality gra.s.s and shrubbery in even-s.p.a.ced clumps, with park-type benches between the shrubs overhung by white-barked willows who've now wept their yellow autumn grit onto the green benches and gra.s.s banks where an arc of crowd now forms and thickens, watching duly designated authorities commence to drain the pond. Some of the pond's flightier ducks have already decamped for points south, and more leave on some phylogenic cue just as the s.h.i.+ny trucks pull up, but the main herd remains. Two private planes fly in lazy ellipses just under the cloud-cover overhead, banners strung out behind them advertising four different levels of comfort and protection from Depend. The wind keeps blowing the banners sideways, mobiusizing them and then straightening them back out with the loud pop of flags unfurling. From the ground the engines and banners' pops are too faint to hear above the crowd-noise and ducks and wind's mean whistle. The swirling groundwind's so bad that U.S. Chief of Unspecified Services Rodney Tine, standing with his hands at the small of his back at a window on the eighth floor of the State House Annex on Beacon and Joy Sts., looking southwest and down at the concentric rings of pond and crowd and trucks, can see wind-driven leaves and street-grit swirling right outside and pecking at this very window he stands before, ma.s.saging his coccyx.

Dr. James O. Incandenza, filmmaker and almost a scopophile about spect-ops and crowds, never once missed this spectacle, when alive and in town. Hal and Mario have both been to a few. So have several Ennet residents, though some of them weren't in much of a position to remember. It seems as if everyone in metro Boston's seen at least one pond-draining. It's always the same sort of grim windy Northeast November day where if you were at home you'd be eating earth-tone soups in a warm kitchen, listening to the wind and glad of home and hearth. Every year Himself came was the same. The deciduous trees were always skeletal, the pines palsied, the willows wind-whipped and nubbly, the gra.s.s dun and crunchy underfoot, the water-rats always seeing the big drainage-picture first and gliding like night to the cement sides to flee. Always a crowd in thickening rings. Always rollerblades on the Gardens' paths, lovers joined at the hand, Frisbee in the distance on the rim of the Gardens' other side's hillside's slope, which faces away from the pond.

U.S. Office of Unspecified Services Chief Rodney Tine stands at the unclean window for much of the morning, ruminative, his posture a martial at-ease. A stenographer and an aide and a Deputy Mayor and the Director of the Ma.s.sachusetts Division for Substance Abuse Services, and Unspecified Services Regional Operatives Rodney Tine Jr. 257 257 and Hugh Steeply and Hugh Steeply 258 258 all sit silently in the conference room behind him, the stenographer's Gregg pen poised in mid-dictation. The eighth-floor window's purview goes all the way to the ridge of the hillside at the Gardens' other end. Two Frisbees and what looks like a disembowelled ring of Frisbee float back and forth along this ridge, dreamily floating back and forth, sometimes dipping below the ridge and lost, for a moment, to the specular vision of Tine. all sit silently in the conference room behind him, the stenographer's Gregg pen poised in mid-dictation. The eighth-floor window's purview goes all the way to the ridge of the hillside at the Gardens' other end. Two Frisbees and what looks like a disembowelled ring of Frisbee float back and forth along this ridge, dreamily floating back and forth, sometimes dipping below the ridge and lost, for a moment, to the specular vision of Tine.

Trying at the same time to give his bad skin some quality UV and a good chill's chap, the grad-work-study engineer of M.I.T.'s WYYY-109 lies bare-chested on a silvery NASA-souvenir s.p.a.ce blanket, supine and cruciform at about the angle of a living-room recliner on the Public Gardens' far hillside. This is out by Arlington St., in the Gardens' southwest corner, hidden by its ridge from the pond's basin and tourism booth and pavilion and the hub of radial paths and the giant verdigrised statues of ducklings in a row commemorating Robert McCloskey's beloved and timeless Make Way for Ducklings Make Way for Ducklings. The Gardens' only other slope is now the bowl of the former pond. The hillside's gra.s.sy decline, not too steep, runs at a wedge's angle down toward Arlington St. and is one broad greensward, free of dog droppings because dogs won't go to the bathroom on inclined terrain. Frisbees float on the ridge behind the engineer's head, and four lithe boys on the ridge play a game with a small beanbaggy ball and bare blue feet. It is 5 C. The sun has the attenuated autumn quality of seeming to be behind several panes of gla.s.s. The wind is bitter and keeps flopping unmoored sections of NASA blanket over parts of the engineer's body. Goose-pimples and real pimples jostle each other for s.p.a.ce on his exposed flesh. The student engineer's is the hillside's only metallic s.p.a.ce blanket and bare torso. He lies there splayed, wholly open to the weak sun. The WYYY student engineer is one of roughly three dozen human forms scattered over the steep slope, a human collection without pattern or cohesion or anything to bind them, looking rather like firewood before it's been gathered. Wind-bronzed sooty men in zipperless parkas and mismatched shoes, some of the Gardens' permanent residents, sleeping or in stupors of various origin. Curled on their sides, knees drawn up, unopen to anything. In other words huddled. From the great height of one of Arlington St.'s office buildings, the forms look like things dumped onto the hillside from a great height. An overhead veteran'd be apt to see a post-battle-battlefield aspect to the array of forms. Except for the WYYY engineer, all the men are textured in urban scuz, unshaven, yellow-fingered and exposure-bronzed. They have coats and bedrolls for blankets and old twine-handle shopping bags and Glad bags for recyclable cans and bottles. Also huge camper's packs without any color to them. Their clothes and appurtenances are the same color as the men, in other words. A few have steel supermarket-carts filled with possessions and wedged by their owners' bodies against a downhill roll. One of the cart-owners has vomited in his sleep, and the vomit has a.s.sumed a lava-like course toward the huddled form of another man curled just downhill. One of the shopping carts, from upscale Bread & Circus, has an ingeniously convenient little calculator on its handlebar, designed to let shoppers subtotal their groceries as they select them. The men have sepia nails and all somehow look toothless whether they have teeth or not. Every so often a Frisbee lands among them. The loose ball makes a beanbaggy sound against players' feet above and behind them. Two skinny and knit-capped boys descend very close to the engineer, chanting very softly 'Smoke,' ignoring all the other forms, which anyone could tell are undercapitalized for purchasing Smoke. When his eyes are open he's the only one on the hillside to see the round bellies of ascending ducks pa.s.s low overhead, catching a thermal off the hillside and rising to wheel away left, due south. His WYYY-109 T-s.h.i.+rt and inhaler and gla.s.ses and M. Fizzy and spine-split copy of Metallurgy of Annular Isotopes Metallurgy of Annular Isotopes are just off the edge of the reflecting blanket. His torso is pale and ribby, his chest covered with tough little b.u.t.tons of acne scar. The hillside's gra.s.s is still pretty viable. One or two of the scattered fetal forms have black cans of burnt-out Sterno beside them. Bits of the hillside are reflected in Arlington's storefronts and office windows and the gla.s.s of pa.s.sing cars. An unexceptional white Dodge or Chevy-type van pulls out of Arlington's traffic and does some pretty impressive parallel parking along the curb at the hillside's bottom. A man in an ancient NATO-surplus wool greatcoat is up on his hands and knees to the engineer's lower left, throwing up. Bits of chyme hang from his mouth and refuse to detach. There's little b.l.o.o.d.y threads in it. His hunched form looks somehow canine on the uneven slope. The fetal figure wedged unconscious under the front wheels of the shopping cart nearest the engineer has only one shoe, and that shoe's without laces. The exposed sock is ash-colored. Besides the HANDICAPPED license plate, the only exceptional things about the van now idling at the curb far below are the tinted windows and the fact that the van is spotless and twinkly with wax to about halfway up its panelled side, but above that line dirty and rust-saucered and shamefully neglected-looking. The engineer has been turning his head this way and that, trying to tan evenly along his whole jawline. The curbside van idles at a distant little point between his heels. Some of the hillside's forms have curled themselves around bottles and pipes. A smell comes off them, rich and agricultural. The student engineer doesn't usually try to sun and chap his skin at the same time, but chapping-ops have lately been scarce: since Madame Psychosis of '60+/' took her sudden leave of medical absence, the student engineer hasn't once had the heart to sit out on the Union's convoluted roof and monitor the subst.i.tute shows. are just off the edge of the reflecting blanket. His torso is pale and ribby, his chest covered with tough little b.u.t.tons of acne scar. The hillside's gra.s.s is still pretty viable. One or two of the scattered fetal forms have black cans of burnt-out Sterno beside them. Bits of the hillside are reflected in Arlington's storefronts and office windows and the gla.s.s of pa.s.sing cars. An unexceptional white Dodge or Chevy-type van pulls out of Arlington's traffic and does some pretty impressive parallel parking along the curb at the hillside's bottom. A man in an ancient NATO-surplus wool greatcoat is up on his hands and knees to the engineer's lower left, throwing up. Bits of chyme hang from his mouth and refuse to detach. There's little b.l.o.o.d.y threads in it. His hunched form looks somehow canine on the uneven slope. The fetal figure wedged unconscious under the front wheels of the shopping cart nearest the engineer has only one shoe, and that shoe's without laces. The exposed sock is ash-colored. Besides the HANDICAPPED license plate, the only exceptional things about the van now idling at the curb far below are the tinted windows and the fact that the van is spotless and twinkly with wax to about halfway up its panelled side, but above that line dirty and rust-saucered and shamefully neglected-looking. The engineer has been turning his head this way and that, trying to tan evenly along his whole jawline. The curbside van idles at a distant little point between his heels. Some of the hillside's forms have curled themselves around bottles and pipes. A smell comes off them, rich and agricultural. The student engineer doesn't usually try to sun and chap his skin at the same time, but chapping-ops have lately been scarce: since Madame Psychosis of '60+/' took her sudden leave of medical absence, the student engineer hasn't once had the heart to sit out on the Union's convoluted roof and monitor the subst.i.tute shows.

The engineer moves his upturned face back and forth. First, Madame was replaced by a Ma.s.s Comm. graduate student who proved a crus.h.i.+ng disappointment as a Miss Diagnosis; then Madame was publicly deemed irreplaceable by management, and the engineer is now paid simply to cue her background music and then sit monitoring a live mike for a noiseless 60 minutes, which means he has to stay in his booth maintaining 0-levels with a live mike and can't ascend with his receiver and cigarettes even if he wanted to. The station's student manager's given the engineer written instructions on just what to say when people phone in during the hour to inquire and wish Psychosis a speedy recovery from whatever might ail her. At once denying and encouraging rumors of suicide, inst.i.tutionalization, spiritual crisis, silent retreat, pilgrimage to the snow-capped East. The disappearance of someone who's been only a voice is somehow worse instead of better. A terrible silence now, weeknights. A different silence altogether from the radio-silence-type silence that used to take up over half her nightly show. Silence of presence v. silence of absence, maybe. The silences on the tapes are the worst. Some listeners have actually come in and down through the deep cortex and into the cold pink studio itself, to inquire. Some to allay this firm conviction that Madame was still actually still showing up and sitting there by the mike but not saying anything. Another of the men sleeping nearby keeps punching at the air in his sleep. Almost all the personal wee-hour inquiries are from listeners somehow bent, misshapen, speech-defective, vacantly grinning, damaged in some way. The type whose spectacles have been repaired with electrician's tape. Shyly inquiring. Apologies for bothering someone they can clearly see is not even there. Before the student manager's written instructions, the student engineer'd wordlessly directed their attention to Madame's triptych screen with no silhouette behind it. Another white Dodge van, just as unevenly clean and opaque-windowed, has appeared on the ridge above and behind the hillside's littered forms. It casts no visible shadow. A Frisbee-ring caroms off the clean grille of its snout. It idles, its panel door facing the declivity and the other white van's panel door far below. One hideous little inquirer had had a hat with a lens on it and seemed about to fall forward into the engineer's lap. His attendant wanting some address where they might send something supportive and floral. The NASA blanket's micronized aluminumoid coating is designed to refract every possible UV ray into the student engineer's bare skin. The engineer knows about the ambulance and the Brigham and Women's ICU and five-day rehab ward from the thick swart girl Notkin, the one with the disreputable hat and Film-Dept. I.D. who came down via the Basilar elevator late at night to retrieve some old tapes of the program for the Madame's personal listening use, she said, and was fortunate enough to know the Madame in private life, she said. The term is Treatment Treatment, Madame Psychosis is in long-term Treatment Treatment at something the bearded girl in the sooty hat obliquely described as only half a house in some unbelievably unpleasant and low-rent part of the metro-area. This is the precise total of what the WYYY engineer knows. He is shortly to have occasion to wish he knew a great deal more. Q.v. the dimpled steel ramp now protruding from the squeakily opened panel door of the van on the ridge above and behind him. Q.v. the utter darkness inside the idling van down along the Arlington St. curb, whose side panel's also been slid open from within. The southwest hillside is copless: the Gardens' platoon of M.D.C. Finest are all in their souped-up golf carts over at the drained pond, throwing curved sections of glazed doughnut into the ducks' shrubbery and telling a largely-dispersed-already crowd to please move along. The ridge's Frisbees and hackysackers have abruptly vanished; there's now an eerie stillness like a reef when a shark cruises through; the ridge's van's idling maw open and black, silver-tongued. at something the bearded girl in the sooty hat obliquely described as only half a house in some unbelievably unpleasant and low-rent part of the metro-area. This is the precise total of what the WYYY engineer knows. He is shortly to have occasion to wish he knew a great deal more. Q.v. the dimpled steel ramp now protruding from the squeakily opened panel door of the van on the ridge above and behind him. Q.v. the utter darkness inside the idling van down along the Arlington St. curb, whose side panel's also been slid open from within. The southwest hillside is copless: the Gardens' platoon of M.D.C. Finest are all in their souped-up golf carts over at the drained pond, throwing curved sections of glazed doughnut into the ducks' shrubbery and telling a largely-dispersed-already crowd to please move along. The ridge's Frisbees and hackysackers have abruptly vanished; there's now an eerie stillness like a reef when a shark cruises through; the ridge's van's idling maw open and black, silver-tongued.

Q.v. also the wheelchair that now all of a sudden shoots down the hillside's van's ramp as a madly squeaking bra.s.s-colored blur, a snowplow-like scoop-type thing welded to it and out front skimming the ground and throwing off chaff from the swath of gra.s.s it's mowing, moving terrifically fast, brakes unapplied, the legless figure up on burly stumps in the chair fleur-de-lis-with-sword-stem-masked and bent far forward for a skier's pure speed, the huddled fetal hillside figures the speeding chair slaloms, the dim glittered movements of arrangement for reception deep within the curbside van way at the bottom of the steep grade, the engineer arching his neck way out to capture sun on the scarred hollows under his jaw, the shopping cart with the calculator clipped by a squeaking rubberized wheel at an angle and sent clattering off down the hillside, spraying possessions, the homeless shoe to which it had been roped skittering empty behind it and the cart's now shoeless unconscious owner just waving at the air in front of his face in sleep as if at a bad D.T.-dream of lost shoe and worldly goods, the calculating cart whumping into the side of the hunched man vomiting and flipping over and bouncing several times and the vomiting man rolling and yelping, vulgarities echoing, the WYYY engineer now to be seen hiking himself up on a chill-reddened elbow with a start and starting to turn and look above and behind him up at the ridge just as the speeding wheelchair with the hunched figure reaches him and the chair's shovel scoops the engineer and his NASA blanket and s.h.i.+rt and book up and runs over the gla.s.ses and bottle of M. Fizzy with one wheel and bears the engineer in the scoop up and away and down the steep grade toward the idling van at the bottom, a van whose own angled ramp now slides out like a tongue or Autoteller's transaction-receipt, the NASA blanket blowing away from the scooped engineer's flailing form about halfway down and suddenly aloft in a hillside thermal and blown far out over Arlington St. traffic by the keen November wind, the madly squeaking wheelchair aloft over hillside moguls and coming back down and up again, the s.n.a.t.c.hed engineer in the chair's scoop appearing to the hillside's roused figures mostly as a hallucinatory waggle of bare limbs and strangely wheezy shrieks for Help or at least to Look Out Below, all as the modified chair squeaks frantically straight down the hillside's most efficient downward line toward the van with the ramp now idling in gear, its pipe's exhaust beating the street in high-rpm idle, the NASA blanket twisting coruscant in the air high above the street, and the shriek-roused figures on the hillside lying there still bent in and barely moving, stiff with cold and general woe, except for the hunched man, the unwell man who'd been hit by the dislodged cart, who's rolled to a stop and is thras.h.i.+ng, holding the parts that were hit.

11 NOVEMBER.

YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT.

1810h., 133 kids and thirteen a.s.sorted staff sitting down at suppertime, the E.T.A. dining hall taking most of the first floor of West House, a sort of airy atrium-like commons, broad and knotty-pine-panelled, the east wall hugely fenestrated and columns running the length of the room at center, with ceiling fans high overhead circulating the rich and slightly sour smell of bulk-prepared food, the oceanic sound of 20 different tables' conversation, the flat clink of utensils on plates, much chewing, the clank and tinkle of the dishwasher's conveyor belt behind the tray-bus window with its sign saying YR MOTHER DOES NOT LIVE HERE; BUS YR TRAY, YR MOTHER DOES NOT LIVE HERE; BUS YR TRAY, the m.u.f.fled shouts of kitchen workers in steam. The top uppercla.s.smen get the best table, an un-spoken tradition, the one nearest the gas fireplace in winter and the AC venting in July, the one whose chairs' legs are all pretty much even, both seats and backs with thin corduroy cus.h.i.+ons in E.T.A. red and gray. The prorectors have their own permanent table near the carbs bar; the Syrian Satelliter and enormous peasant-skirted the m.u.f.fled shouts of kitchen workers in steam. The top uppercla.s.smen get the best table, an un-spoken tradition, the one nearest the gas fireplace in winter and the AC venting in July, the one whose chairs' legs are all pretty much even, both seats and backs with thin corduroy cus.h.i.+ons in E.T.A. red and gray. The prorectors have their own permanent table near the carbs bar; the Syrian Satelliter and enormous peasant-skirted Moment Moment soft-profiler are with them. soft-profiler are with them.

The players can all do some very serious eating, some of them still in sweaty sweats with salt-stiff hair, too hungry after three-set P.M P.M.s to shower before refueling. Coed tables are quietly discouraged. The Boys 18's and the cream of the 16's are all at the best table. Ortho ('The Darkness') Stice, E.T.A.'s 16's A-1, has just this P.M. gone three sets with Hal Incandenza, seventeen, E.T.A.'s second-best overall boy, taking Hal all the way to 75 in the third in an off-record nonchallenge exhibitionish engagement Scht.i.tt had them play out on the West Courts that afternoon for reasons no one has yet pinned down. The match's audience had grown steadily as other challenges got done and people came up from the weight room and showers. News that Stice had very nearly beaten an Inc n.o.body but John Wayne has been able to beat has made its figure-eight way around the tables and serving line and salad bar, and lots of younger kids keep looking to the best table and Stice, sixteen, crew-cutted and still in his black Fila sweats with no s.h.i.+rt under the unzipped top, a.s.sembling a complex sandwich on his plate, and they let their eyes widen and postures sag to communicate awe: R.H.I.P.

Stice, oblivious, bites into his sandwich like it's the wrist of an a.s.sailant. The only sound at the table for the first few minutes is of forkwork and mastication and the slight gasping sounds of people trying to breathe while they eat. You rarely speak for the first few minutes here, eating. Supper is deadly-serious. Some of the kids even start in on their trays while still in line at the milk dispenser. Now Coyle bites in. Wayne has made his entree into a sandwich and lowers and bites. Keith Freer's eyes are half closed as his jaw muscles bulge and slacken. Some of the players' inclined heads are hard to see over the height of their food. Struck and Schacht, side by side, bite in sync and chew. The only one at the table not eating like a refugee is Trevor Axford, who as a small child back in Short Beach CT once fell off his bike onto his head and received a tiny lesion-type brain injury after which all food everywhere tastes horrible to him. His clearest explanation of the way food tastes to him is that it tastes the way vomit smells. He's discouraged from speaking at meals and holds his nose while he eats and eats with the neutral joyless expression of somebody dispensing fuel into his car. Hal Incandenza dismantles the stelliform-mold shape E.T.A. mashed potatoes come in, mixing baby-boileds in with the mashed. Petropolis Kahn and Eliot Kornspan eat with such horrible P.O.W.ish gusto that n.o.body else will sit with them - they're by themselves at a small table behind Schacht and Struck, utensils glittering amid a kind of fine mist or spray. Jim Troeltsch keeps holding a clear tumbler of milk up to the ceiling's full-spectrum lights and swirling the milk around in the light, looking at it. Pemulis chews with his mouth open, producing moist noises, a habit so family-of-origin-ingrained no amount of peer pressure can break him of it.

Eventually The Darkness clears his throat to speak. In the showers he'd gotten up to the middle of an Xmas story about one of his parents' epic rows. His parents had met and fallen in love in a Country/Western bar in Partridge KS - just outside Liberal KS on the Oklahoma border - met and fallen in star-crossed love in a bar playing this popular Kansas C/W-bar-game where they put their bare forearms together and laid a lit cigarette in the little valley between the two forearms' flesh and kept it there till one of them finally jerked their arm away and reeled away holding their arm. Mr. and Mrs. Stice each discovered somebody else that wouldn't jerk away and reel away, Stice explained. Their forearms were still to this day covered with little white slugs of burn-scar. They'd toppled like pines for each other from the git-go, Stice explained. They'd been divorced and remarried four or five times, depending on how you defined certain juris-prudential precepts. When they were on good domestic terms they stayed in their bedroom for days of squeaking springs with the door locked except for brief sallies out for Beefeater gin and Chinese take-out in little white cardboard pails with wire handles, with the Stice children wandering ghostlike through the clapboard house in sagging diapers or woolen underwear subsisting on potato chips out of econ.o.bags bigger than most of them were, the Stice kids. The kids did somewhat physically better during periods of nuptial strife, when a stony-faced Mr. Stice slammed the kitchen door and went off daily to sell crop insurance while Mrs. Stice - whom both Mr. Stice and The Darkness called 'The Bride' - while The Bride spent all day and evening cooking intricate multicourse meals she'd feed bits of to The Brood (Stice refers to both himself and his six siblings as 'The Brood') and then keep warm in quietly rattling-lidded pots and then hurl at the kitchen walls when Mr. Stice came home smelling of gin and of cigarette-brands and toilet-eau not The Bride's own. Ortho Stice loves his folks to distraction, but not blindly, and every holiday home to Partridge KS he memorizes highlights of their connubial battles so he can regale the E.T.A. uppercla.s.smen with them, mostly at meals, after the initial forkwork and gasping have died down and people have returned to sufficient levels of blood-sugar and awareness of their surroundings to be regaled. Some of them listen, drifting in and out. Troeltsch and Pemulis are arguing about whether E.T.A.'s kitchen staff has started trying to slip them powdered milk on the sly. Freer and Wayne are still hunched and chewing, very intent. Hal's making some sort of structure out of his food. Struck keeps both elbows on the table at all times and utensils in his clenched fists like a parody of a man eating. Pemulis always listens to Stice's tales, often repeating little phrases, shaking his head in admiration.

'I'm just going to go up and refuse to eat one more thing with a utensil that's gone down the disposal.' Schacht is holding up a fork with crazy tines. 'Just look at it. Who could eat with something like that.'

'The old man is a son of a b.i.t.c.h that is cool under fire, in terms of The Bride,' Stice says, leaning in to bite and chew. The tendency at E.T.A. is to take the entree and unless it's a wet entree to take wheat bread and make it a sandwich, for the extra carbs. It's like Pemulis can't really taste his food unless he mashes it against his palate. The Academy's wheat bread is bicycled in by guys in Birkenstock sandals from Bread & Circus Quality Provisions in Cambridge, because it's got to be not only sugarless but low in glutens, which Tavis and Scht.i.tt believe promote torpor and excess mucus. Axford, who lost to Tall Paul Shaw in straight sets and if he loses to him again tomorrow goes down to #5-A, stares stonily into s.p.a.ce, his motions less like somebody eating than like somebody miming eating. Hal's made an intricate fortification-structure of his food, complete with turrets and archer-slits, and even though he's not much eating or drinking his six cranberry juices he keeps swallowing a lot, studying his structure. As the eating slows down at the best table the more observant of them give Hal and Ax-ford tiny sideways looks, the players' different CPUs humming through Decision Trees on whether a still-publicly-undiscussed but much-rumored showdown with Dr. Tavis and the O.N.A.N.T.A. urology guy, plus now this loss to Shaw and near-loss to Ortho Stice, might not have shaken Inc and Axhandle along some psychic compet.i.tive fault-line, different guys with different rankings calculating the permuted advantages to themselves of Hal and Axford having a deeply distracted and anxious week. Though Michael Pemulis, the other rumored O.N.A.N.T.A. urine-scannee, ignores Axford's expression and Hal's excessive swallowing altogether, though possibly studiously ignoring them, staring meditatively at the squeegees 259 259 taken down off the wall and leaning against the unlit fireplace, fingers steepled before his lips, hearing out Troeltsch, who blows his nose with one hand and rattles his tumbler of half-drunk milk on the tabletop with the other. taken down off the wall and leaning against the unlit fireplace, fingers steepled before his lips, hearing out Troeltsch, who blows his nose with one hand and rattles his tumbler of half-drunk milk on the tabletop with the other.

Pemulis shakes his head very seriously at Troeltsch. 'Not a chance, brother.'

'I'm telling you man this milk is powdered.' Troeltsch peering down into the tumbler, probing the milk's surface with a thick finger. 'Me I can tell from powdered. I have growing-up domestic confirmed traumas around powdered. The day Mother announced milk was too heavy to keep lugging back from the store and switched to powdered, with Father's OK. Father knuckling under like Roosevelt at Yalta. My big sister ran away from home, home, and the rest of us were traumatized around it, this switch to powdered, which is unmistakable if you know what to look for.' and the rest of us were traumatized around it, this switch to powdered, which is unmistakable if you know what to look for.'

Freer makes a snoring noise.

'And do I ever know what to look for, to verify.' Troeltsch is hoa.r.s.e, and one of these people who speaks to more than one person at once by looking from one person to one person to one person; he's not a born public speaker. 'Namely your telltale residues along the sides of the gla.s.s, when swished.' W/ great flourished swis.h.i.+ngs of the milk.

'Except Troeltsch you can turn around and see them f.u.c.king loading the bags into the dispenser every twenty minutes. Bags of milk. That say MILK MILK on them, the bags. Liquid, sloshy, hard to handle. It's milk.' on them, the bags. Liquid, sloshy, hard to handle. It's milk.'

'You see bags, you see the word MILK MILK. They're counting on the packaging. Image management. Sensory management.' Responding to Pemulis but looking at Struck. 'Part of some larger overall kertw.a.n.g. Possible punishment for the Eschaton thing.' Eyes going briefly to Hal. 'Covert vitamins possibly next. Let's not even mention saltpeter. Put aside deductions from bags a second. I'm sticking to facts. Fact: this is verifiably powdered milk.'

'You're saying they mix powdered milk and then try and pour it into milk-bags, all to allay?'

Schacht clears his mouth and swallows mightily. 'Tavis can't even regrout tile in the locker room without calling a Community Meeting or appointing a committee. The Regrouting Committee's been dragging along since May. Suddenly they're pulling secret 0300 milk-switches? It doesn't ring true, Jim.'

'And Troeltsch has a cold, he said,' Freer observes, indicating the little bottle of Seldane next to Troeltsch's squeezing-ball, by his plate. 'You can't even taste, Troeltsch, if you got a real cold.'

'Trevor should have the cold, Axhandle, no?' Schacht says, tapping carminative capsules onto his palm from his own amber bottle.

With supper they can choose milk or else cranberry juice, that most carb-caloric of juices, which froths redly in its own clear dispenser by the salad bar. The milk dispenser stands alone against the west wall, a big huge 24-liter three-bagger, the milk inserted in ovaloid mammarial bags into its refrigerated cabinet of brushed steel, with three receptacles for tumblers and three levers for controlled dispensing. There's two levers for skim and one for supposedly high-lecithin chocolate skim, which every new E.T.A. tries exactly once and discovers tastes like skim with a brown crayon melted into it. There's a sign in a kitchen-staffer's crude black block caps taped to the dispenser's facade that says MILK IS FILLING; DRINK WHAT YOU TAKE. The sign used to say MILK IS FILLING, DRINK WHAT YOU TAKE until the comma was semicolonized by the insertion of a blue dot by a fairly obvious person. 260 260 The line for seconds on entrees now stretches out past the milk dispenser. The best thing about satiation and slowing down on the eating is leaning back and feeling autolysis start in on what you ate and tending to your teeth while you gaze around the airy room at crowds and clumps of kids, observing behaviors and pathologies with a clear and sated head. The littler kids running in tight circles trying to follow the shadow of the ceiling fan. Girls laughing crumpled against their seatmates' shoulders. People protecting their plates. The blurred s.e.xuality and indecisive postures of p.u.b.erty. Two marginal male 16's have their heads directly in the bowls in the salad bar, and some of the surrounding females are commenting. Different kids are ill.u.s.trating points with different gestures. John Wayne and Keith Freer stroll purposefully through the serpentine crowd and up to the front of the Seconds line and insert themselves in front of a little boy who's tearing at a held bagel with great violent movements of head and neck. The 18-A's get free b.u.t.tinskis: R.H.I. literal P., at E.T.A. Jim Struck spears one of the cherry tomatoes out of Hal's salad bowl with a savage fork-gesture; Hal makes no comment. The line for seconds on entrees now stretches out past the milk dispenser. The best thing about satiation and slowing down on the eating is leaning back and feeling autolysis start in on what you ate and tending to your teeth while you gaze around the airy room at crowds and clumps of kids, observing behaviors and pathologies with a clear and sated head. The littler kids running in tight circles trying to follow the shadow of the ceiling fan. Girls laughing crumpled against their seatmates' shoulders. People protecting their plates. The blurred s.e.xuality and indecisive postures of p.u.b.erty. Two marginal male 16's have their heads directly in the bowls in the salad bar, and some of the surrounding females are commenting. Different kids are ill.u.s.trating points with different gestures. John Wayne and Keith Freer stroll purposefully through the serpentine crowd and up to the front of the Seconds line and insert themselves in front of a little boy who's tearing at a held bagel with great violent movements of head and neck. The 18-A's get free b.u.t.tinskis: R.H.I. literal P., at E.T.A. Jim Struck spears one of the cherry tomatoes out of Hal's salad bowl with a savage fork-gesture; Hal makes no comment.

Troeltsch has run his thick finger around the inside of the tumbler and is holding the digit out at different guys around the table. 'Note a certain bluish cast to it. Traces and remains. Suspicious foam. Minute grains of not quite altogether dissolved particulate powdered stuff. Powdered always leaves its telltale signs.'

'Your f.u.c.king head is a minute grain, Troeltsch.'

'Put that finger away.'

'Tryna eat eat here.' here.'

'Paranoia,' Pemulis says, scooping up stray peas with the flat of his knife.

'Base tuition of 21,700 scooters, not counting,' Troeltsch says, moving the finger back and forth in the air - the stuff drying on the finger does not, admittedly, exactly look appet.i.te-whetting - 'and yet let's note how the Lung's not up in spite of rampant weather and Achilles'-complaints, and today's lunch a total deja vu of yesterday's lunch, and the bread and bagels they've started getting us Day-Old with the yellow stickers on the bags, and there's dinette sets in the tunnels and acoustic tiles in the halls and lawn-mowers in the kitchen and tripods in the gra.s.s and squeegees on the wall and Stice's bed moves around, and there's a ball machine ball machine in the girls' lockers, Longley reports, that for this kind of tuition none of this stuff the staff can get around to cleaning up bef-' in the girls' lockers, Longley reports, that for this kind of tuition none of this stuff the staff can get around to cleaning up bef-'

Stice's head has jerked up, a trace of mashed potato on his nose. 'Who says my bed moves? How's it you know anything about any beds moving?'

But it's true. The Husky VI tripod of Mario's near-fatal encounter with the U.S.S. Millicent Kent was only the beginning. Starting with the mysterious and continuing fall of acoustic ceiling-tiles from their places in the subdorms' drop ceilings, inanimate objects have either been moved into or just out of nowhere appearing in wildly inappropriate places around E.T.A. for the past couple months in a steadily accelerating and troubling cycle. Last week a grounds-crew lawnmower sitting clean and silent and somehow menacing in the middle of the dawn kitchen gave Mrs. Clarke the fantods and resulted in Eggplant Parmesan for two suppers in a row, which sent shock waves. Yesterday A.M A.M. there'd been a cannonesque ball machine - no small feat to move around anywhere or get through doors - in the Females' Sauna, which machine some of the uppercla.s.s girls had found and screamed at when they went in for the dawn saunas that help alleviate some vague female-type problem that none of the guys quite fathom. And two black girls on the breakfast crew reportedly found a set of squeegees on the dining hall's north wall, several meters up and hung crossed in a kind of saltire, placed there by parties unknown. F. D. V. Harde's A.M A.M. groundsmen reportedly took the things down, and now they're leaning by the fireplace. The inappropriate found objects have had a tekt.i.tic and sinister aspect: none of the cheery odor of regular pranksterism; they're not funny. To varying degrees they've given everyone the fantods. Mrs. Clarke had taken the morning off again, was why the repeat-lunch. Stice's eyes are back on his plate, which is nearly clean. Unmentioned is the fact that Schacht and Tall Paul Shaw at lunch went over the whole part of the north wall the black girls said they found the squeegees on and could find neither nails nor holes from nails, as in no visible means of attachment. The whole thing's been studiously not talked about, adding to everybody's discomfort at Troeltsch's hoa.r.s.e complaints about tuition, which vary in specifics but are otherwise routine.

'And then now the ultimate dietary cl.u.s.ter-f.u.c.k: attempted powdered milk.'

'Trying to foist it you're saying.'

'I'm saying and look at us and what do we do?'

'Fake a cold and stay in bed playing sportscaster with the TP, in protest?' says Pemulis.

Troeltsch uses the bottle of Seldane to point for emphasis. 'We don't want to hear about it. We look the other way with our heads in the sand.'

'Sounds f.u.c.king painful.'

'Go find some f.u.c.king synonyms for beat beat.'

Stice swallows hugely: 'Never open your eyes underground: my old man's dictum.'

'And so we distract ourselves,' Troeltsch says; 'we yuck it up.'

Pemulis makes a k-sound. 'Here's the real question: how dumb is Troeltsch?'

'Troeltsch's so dumb he thinks a manila folder's a Filipino contortionist.'

'Troeltsch, who's buried in Grant's Tomb?'

Kyle Coyle says surely they've all heard the one about what do Canadian girls put behind their ears to attract boys. John Wayne gives him not a look. Wayne's peering inside his own tumbler, where there does seem to be some sort of residue. There are fragments of lettuce in his eyelashes. Ortho Stice's cheeks are ballooned with food, his eyes on his own salad's remains, expression abstract and furrowed. A terrible kind of community energy in the whole dining hall, a kind of anxious sound-carpet under the surf of voices and the tinkle of flatware, and The Darkness is at some vague center of this energy, somehow, you can feel. Neither Wayne nor Hal's been approachable all fall, on-court. Kids at other tables say low-toned things to their seatmates, and then the seatmate looks covertly over at Stice's table. Forehead purply crumpled, Stice stares hard at his salad and tries to block input from his phenomenal peripheral vision. Two 14's are contending over toast. Petropolis Kahn is preparing to catapult a chickpea at somebody. Jim Struck points out Bridgette Boone and the U.S.S. Millicent Kent returning for what Struck counts as Fourths, and Stice blocks the sight out. The sad pretty sunset out over the hilltops of Newton cannot be seen because the room's big windows face east, out over the hillside and the Enfield Marine complex that the Academy has bathed in shadow, so E.M.'s porch lights are already on, and tall cubist bits of the old metropolis beyond that, east, with shadows encroaching. The afternoon just past was a glory, scrubbed and cool and windless, cloud-free, the sun a disk, the sky a dome, soaked in light, even the northern horizons bell-clear against a faint green-yellow cast. Schacht has about eight amber bottles of various medicines for his Crohn's Disease, and a whole ritual of administration. A couple of the black girls who work kitchen and custodial day-s.h.i.+fts can be seen against the shadowy tree-line, making their way down the steep hillside's unauthorized path back down to the halfway-house thing for wretched people who come up here to work short-time. The girls' bright cheap jackets are vivid in the shadow and trees' tangle. The girls are having to hold hands against the grade, walking sideways and digging heavily in at each step. The black girl Clenette Hal had read fear in as she left C.T.'s office with his litter now has a bulging backpack on her back, as in bulging maybe with dumpster-pilferage, 261 261 her arms strung way out between the other black girl Didi and the trees she grabs and digging in sideways with each step, the hesitancy of steep dark slopes, rooty and shot through with briers. her arms strung way out between the other black girl Didi and the trees she grabs and digging in sideways with each step, the hesitancy of steep dark slopes, rooty and shot through with briers.

A girl with bangs rises and tings her tumbler with a spoon to make an announcement; n.o.body pays any attention.

Now Kahn's by custom allowed to come over and sit with them at the best table, post-prandially.

Wayne and Stice both s.h.i.+ver at the same time as the overhead lighting suddenly becomes the big room's primary light.

There's a brief and sort of ignorant discussion on why girls who hit backhands one-handed seem p.r.o.ne to having different-sized b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Hal recalls his brother's late-in-college thing of seeing if he could take a girl out somewhere public and then meet and have covert s.e.x with a whole different girl while still out with the first girl. This was after the girl Orin had been wildly in love with and Himself had compulsively used in films had been disfigured. Orin kept a record of Subjects that was sort of a cross between a chart and a journal. He used to come home and leave it out just pleading to be read. This was back when his brother Orin needed only to have s.e.xual intercourse with them instead of getting them to fall so terribly in love with him they'd never be able to want anyone else. He'd taken obscure ma.s.sage and psych courses and read tantric books whose ill.u.s.trations seemed about as s.e.xy to Hal as Twister.

Coyle says 'Their ankles'; everybody ignores him. Wayne's already left the table.

Little 14-C Bernard Makulic, two tables over from the milk dispenser and const.i.tutionally delicate and not long for E.T.A., throws up in a silky tan cataract onto the floor by his chair, and there is the shriek of the feet of other chairs being scooted in a star pattern away from the table, and the protracted vowels of repulsed children.

Struck, Pemulis, Schacht and Freer have all had s.e.xual intercourse. Coyle's a probable, but reticent. Axford has trouble even publicly showering, much less submitting nude to a female's inspection. Hal is maybe the one male E.T.A. for whom lifetime virginity is a conscious goal. He sort of feels like O.'s having enough acrobatic coitus for all three of them. Freer even has a like souvenir-colposcope bolted to the inside of his locker door where a pin-up'd have been in days of yore, and Pemulis and Struck have allegedly patronized the Combat Zone after the fiscally pressed city'd buckled and rehung the Combat Zone's red lights, east of the Common. But Jim Troeltsch and s.e.x: no way. And with Wayne and Stice the question seems somehow beside the point. Hal's mouth feels like it's overflowing with spit. He should by all rights have lost to Stice today, and he knows it. Stice was in physical control of the third set. Stice choked it away only because he didn't believe he could beat Hal yet, deep down, since Hal's compet.i.tive explosion. But the crisis of faith that cost Stice the match had concerned a different Hal, Hal can tell. It's now a whole new Hal, a Hal who does not get high, or hide, a Hal who in 29 days is going to hand his own personal urine over to authority figures with a wide smile and exemplary posture and not a secretive thought in his head. No one except Pemulis and Axford know it's a whole new and chemical-free Hal who should by all rights have lost to a 16-year-old out there in public on what ended up a gorgeous NNE autumn day.

Wayne had gotten up and bussed his tray in the middle of the jejune breast thing. Ortho ('The Darkness') Stice is still staring into his salad. If you could open Stice's head you'd see a wheel inside another wheel, gears and cogs being widgeted into place. Stice has a secret suspicion about a secret that has more to do with the actual table than with the people at the table. A lot of the guys interpret his intense distraction as Stice's still being in the magic can't-miss Zone from this P.M.'s match.

'The idea being that Nuck girls can only attract guys by being really easy to X, is the joke,' Coyle says into the noise.

Then there's a brief rippling lull in the whole dining hall as little Evan Ingersoll emerges from the Entree Line's end on crutches, his cast new and sailor-hat-white, unsigned, prorector Tony Nw.a.n.gi behind him with his hatchet-face stony, carrying the kid's tray for him. The hall's unease is almost visible, a corona around Ingersoll and the ruptured patellar tendon that'll cost him at least six months of compet.i.tive development. Penn, whose femoral fracture'll cost him a year, isn't even back yet from St. E.'s orthopedic. But at least Ingersoll's back. Hal gets up to go over, Troeltsch rising to accompany him after a long look at Trevor Axford, Ingersoll's B.B. of record, who's sitting in his chair with his eyes shut tight, unable to make any sort of conciliatory gesture. A match-sore Hal not limping but stiff-legged and shoulders slightly rolling as he and Troeltsch move serpentine around tables, steering way clear of the custodian and dull-steel bucket on rollers and the mop spreading and diluting Makulic's chyme out in a thinning circle that clears three tables, which Hal and Troeltsch avoid with practiced curves around tables whose layout they all know well, Hal to say Hey and How's the Limb, Troeltsch to say Hey and be basically relieved he's away from a discussion of females as s.e.xual objects. Troeltsch's never come close to even dating anybody. Some guys here never do. It's the same at all the academies, this as.e.xual contingent. Some junior players don't have the emotional juice left over after tennis to face what dating requires. Bold nerveless guys on the court who go slack and pale at the thought of approaching a female in any social context. Certain things not only can't be taught but can be r.e.t.a.r.ded by other stuff that can be taught. The whole Tavis/Scht.i.tt program here is supposedly a progression toward self-forgetting; some find the whole girl-issue thing brings them face to face with something in themselves they need to believe they've left far behind in order to hang in and develop. Troeltsch, Shaw, Axford: any sort of s.e.xual tension makes them feel like they need more oxygen than is available right then. A couple of the girls at E.T.A. are kind of s.l.u.tty, and some of the more aggressive Freer-type guys can break some of the girls down and get them to have s.e.x - there's nothing if not time and proximity here. But E.T.A. is mostly a comparatively uns.e.xual place, maybe almost surprisingly so, considering the constant roar and gurgle here of adolescent glands, the emphasis on physicality, the fears of mediocrity, the back-and-forth struggles with ego, the loneliness and close proximity. There's scattered h.o.m.os.e.xuality, much of it emotional and unconsummated. Keith Freer's pet theory is that the bulk of E.T.A. females are nascent lesbians who don't know it yet. That like any serious female athletes they're basically vigorously male inside, and so Sapphic-tending. The ones that get to the W.T.A. 262 262 Show'll probably be the only ones who find out that they are, he believes - d.y.k.es that is. The rest will marry and spend a lifetime by the club pool wondering why the hair on their husbands' backs makes them shudder. E.g. the U.S.S. Millicent Kent, sixteen and phenomenal on the incline bench-press, with b.r.e.a.s.t.s like artillery and a b.u.t.t like two bulldogs in a bag (Stice's term, which caught on), already looks like a Penal Matron, Freer likes to observe. And no one likes the fact that Carol Spodek's carried and prized the same single large-grip Donnay stick for going on five straight years. Show'll probably be the only ones who find out that they are, he believes - d.y.k.es that is. The rest will marry and spend a lifetime by the club pool wondering why the hair on their husbands' backs makes them shudder. E.g. the U.S.S. Millicent Kent, sixteen and phenomenal on the incline bench-press, with b.r.e.a.s.t.s like artillery and a b.u.t.t like two bulldogs in a bag (Stice's term, which caught on), already looks like a Penal Matron, Freer likes to observe. And no one likes the fact that Carol Spodek's carried and prized the same single large-grip Donnay stick for going on five straight years.

Ortho Stice of southwest Kansas looks briefly up at Hal and Troeltsch's departure before returning his attention to a certain cherry tomato perched somehow halfway up the shallow incline of his salad bowl. It's possible that the cherry tomato is attached halfway up the incline by an adhesive bit of yogurt dressing rather than just sitting there defying gravity on its own. Stice doesn't use a finger to move the tomato and check this. He's using only his concentrated will. He's trying to will the cherry tomato to roll of its own objectile power down the incline and into the bowl's center. He stares at the cherry tomato with enormous concentration, chewing his tri-level skinless-chicken-fillet sandwich. The chewing makes overlapping plates of muscle all the way up one side of his face and crew-cut scalp bulge and roll. He's trying to flex some kind of psychic muscle he's not sure he even has. The crew cut lends his head an anvil-like aspect. Complete concentration makes his round red fleshy face look crumpled. Stice is one of those athletes whose body you know is an unearned divine gift because its conjunction with his face is so incongruous. He resembles a poorly spliced photo, some superhuman cardboard persona with a hole for your human face. A beautiful sports body, lithe and tapered and sleekly muscled, smooth - like a Polycleitos body, Hermes or Theseus before his trials - on whose graceful neck sits the face of a ravaged Winston Churchill, broad and slab-featured, swart, fleshy, large-pored, with a mottled forehead under the crew cut's V-shaped hairline, and eye-pouches, and jowls that hang and whenever he moves suddenly or lithely make a sort of meaty staccato sound like a wet dog shaking itself dry. Tony Nw.a.n.gi is saying something acerbic to Hal, who looks like he's kneeling penitent before Ingersoll, everyone at the surrounding tables inclined very subtly away from Hal. Troeltsch is signing Ingersoll's cast as he speaks into his fist. Off the court, Ortho Stice's flattop crew cut and penchant for cuff-rolled bluejeans and b.u.t.ton-down short-sleeves with a checkered pattern are strictly from hick. The facial scrunching that attends concentration adds crevices and seams and an uneven flush to the bulldog face. His cheeks are ballooned with food as he stares at the perched cherry tomato, trying to respect this object with all his might. Summoning the sort of coercive reverence he'd felt this P.M P.M. as several b.a.l.l.s' sudden anomalous swerves against wind and their own vectors half convinced Stice they'd become sensitive to his inner will, at crucial times. He'd mis.h.i.+t one cross-court volley and seen the thing head for an area wide even of the doubles sideline and then curve like a drenched spitter back to land just inside the singles corner, and this at a time when the grounds' pines behind Hal Incandenza were breeze-leaning in the exact opposite direction. Hal had given Stice a little bit of a look on that one. Stice couldn't finally tell whether Hal noticed anything amiss in the mysterious curves and downdrafts that seemed to favor The Darkness alone; Hal had played with the wide-eyed but unfocused look of a tennis player right on the verge of falling apart out there, and yet strangely affectless, as if deep inside some well of his own private troubles; and Stice wills himself again not to wonder what had pa.s.sed with the Headmaster and the O.N.A.N.T.A. urologist, whose lab-equipped van's unscheduled appearance in the E.T.A. parking lot yesterday afternoon had caused a tsunami of panic just before supper, especially since Pemulis and his supply of lab-ready Visine bottles were nowhere to be found.

Even among the small circle who know Hal gets secretly high, it doesn't make much sense that Hal's misery'd be Tavis- or urine-related, since Pemulis has never seemed blither than today; and if anyone were going to get the boot, chemically or otherwise, it was not going to be the E.T.A. administration's relative and second-best boy.

Hal and his brother Mario both know that the skim milk at E.T.A. has been pre-mixed powdered milk since Charles Tavis a.s.sumed the helm four years back and told Mrs. Clarke he wanted the kids' animal-fat intake halved in a month by any and all means. The kitchen's graveyard s.h.i.+ft power-mixes it in enormous steel bowls and then strains out the foam and pours the milk into real-milk milk-dispenser bags for a kind of placebo effect; it's mostly just the concept concept of powdered milk that gags people. of powdered milk that gags people.

Struck has traded his s.h.i.+ny clean plate for the absent Incandenza's fortification-structured plate of uneaten fillets, low-gluten bread, corn-bread, baby boileds, a pea-chickpea-based olla, half a fresh squash, mashed potatoes packed in a stelliform gelatin mold, and a shallow bowl of dessert-tsimmes featuring mostly it seemed like plums. Hal is still down on one knee by Ingersoll's chair, his elbows on his knee, listening across Ingersoll and a blindfolded Idris Arslanian to Tony Nw.a.n.gi. Keith Freer remarks blandly on how Hal seems like he's feeling sort of punk this evening, checking Stice for a reaction. Struck utters truisms about wasting food and global hunger through a full mouth. Struck is wearing a Sox cap to the side so the bill shadows half his face. The bread is unkind to his braces. Freer is wearing the leather vest with no s.h.i.+rt under, which is what he favors after weights have pumped his torso full of air. Stice had had a traumatic psychic experience at fourteen when he'd set the weight on the pull-down station too high, and Dr. Dolores Rusk has authorized his exemption from all but very basic weights, pending resolution of his fear of weights. The joke around E.T.A. is that Stice, who's surely Show-bound after graduation, has no fear of heights, but does fear weights. Keith Freer, though kind of a second-rank junior player, does look beautiful in his calfskin vest - his face and body match. Troeltsch wants a sportscasting career, but Freer is the E.T.A. with looks InterLace would favor. Freer's from inland Maryland, originally, his family's riches nouveaux, a family Amway business that hit big in the B.S. '90s with his now-deceased father's invention of a Pet-Rockish novelty that was ubiquitous in stockings for two straight pre-millennial Xmases - the so-called Phoneless Cord. Stice dimly recalls his old man getting a Phoneless Cord in his stocking, ostentatiously packaged, on Ortho's first recallable Xmas, back in Partridge KS, the old man c.o.c.ki