Idris Arslanian
Idris Arslanian is a minor Enfield Tennis Academy student: a shy, new-this-year 14-and-Under player in Hal Incandenza's Big Buddy group, "ethnically vague" in the narration's phrase, devoutly Muslim by his own, all feet and teeth, trailed everywhere by a faint smell of hot dogs. Once he opens his mouth he is anything but shy — he speaks an ornate, formal, article-dropping English ("It is I, Idris Arslanian"), keeps precise track of where he ranks among the little kids, boasts twenty-eight pull-ups, and lobs words like "Solipsism" into the older boys' talk. He wins his singles at the Port Washington meet. His defining thread is a self-imposed blindfold experiment: after prorectors Thorp and Tex Watson scout an incoming blind player (Dymphna) whose high ranking may come from the blindness — the ear judging where a ball will land better than the eye — Arslanian takes up "volunteer blindness," practicing and moving around campus blindfolded to train his own hearing, with comically poor results. The bit recurs across four scenes and is still running on 20 November. His one scene of his own — lost and blindfolded in the tunnels, desperate for a lavatory — also carries his one plot-relevant moment: he is a devout Muslim whose body has never processed a Substance, and Mike Pemulis, mid-urine-testing-crisis, courteously recruits his clean urine. He also serves a disciplinary shit-detail in the tunnels with Todd Possalthwaite on 11 November and encounters "something disturbing" there — reported secondhand, never specified.
Everything the book gives falls inside a roughly three-week November window of the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment. The Dating notes flag an age contradiction carried as printed; scene 114 is UNDATED (see the ruling there).
Appears with
Arc
Arslanian has no arc, strictly — he has a bit, and the book is careful to keep it a bit. What the timeline tracks is a texture character's one season of foreground: introduced as pure locker-room atmosphere (1), all feet and teeth and hot-dog smell, then given a voice in the Big Buddy circle just long enough for the voice itself to become the joke and the charm — the ornate, article-dropping formality that names "alienation" and "Solipsism" from the floor of V.R.6 and answers Hal's loneliness seminar with twenty-eight pull-ups (2). A reported scoreline (3) and a spectacular hat (4) keep him on the roster's visible edge.
The blindfold thread (5) is the closest thing he gets to a story, and it is E.T.A.'s story in miniature: a prorector's speculative theory about the blind prodigy Dymphna — that the ranking comes from the blindness, the ear outjudging the eye — is taken up by the academy's most credulous new kid as a discipline, "volunteer blindness," practiced with total earnestness and comically total failure (he faces the wrong way for play; he runs onto adjacent courts; he gets lost in the tunnels needing a lavatory and cannot lift the rag because Thorp would "evince keen disappointment"). The bit then recurs as pure ambience — blindfolded at dinner (8), the rag demoted to neckwear at the Blood Sister screening where "no one asks him about it" (9), and finally the pre-exhibition tableau, very still in a corner, "his head cocked in the attitude of the blind" (10) — established, iconic, and going nowhere the text records: a theory, a regimen, a self-imposed deprivation, adopted wholesale by a child, in a school that runs on exactly such transactions between authority and belief.
The one beat with consequence in it is the close of his own scene (6): the devout Muslim whose body has never processed a Substance meets the school's great chemist mid-urine-crisis, and his most mundane need — a lavatory — becomes a commodity negotiation he doesn't fully follow ("I am not following"). Whether the deal is consummated the book never says; the beat belongs, narratively, to Pemulis. Even his one errand of apparent consequence — whatever he and Possalthwaite found in the tunnels on their shit-detail (7) — reaches the reader secondhand, unspecified, in someone else's report, in a scene he isn't present for. That asymmetry is the honest summary of Arslanian's place in the novel: a boy other stories happen near — vivid in every appearance, load-bearing in none. Fate open; last attestation 20 Nov, blindfolded, very still, in a corner.
Timeline (10 events)
Key to the timeline
Events are ordered by when they happen in the story, not by where they fall in the book's pages.
★ marks a pivotal event — one that carries this character's arc. Unmarked events add texture around it.
Where an event says how it is known, that basis is one of: narrated (the narration states it), recalled (a character's own memory), reported (secondhand or testimony), claimed (asserted by someone with a stake), or disputed (conflicting versions). Conflicting details are quoted as the book has them rather than resolved.
Dating notes (apparatus)
Kept as printed throughout; event numbers are this page's own numbering.
- The whole timeline is YDAU, Nov 3-20. Every appearance is anchored by its scene's header date except scene 114; there is no undated biographical material (he has no backstory in-text), so the usual pre-Subsidized layering does not apply.
- Scene 114 (5-6) RULED UNDATED. The scene header reads "? Nov YDAU"; nothing in-scene dates it. The events are ORDERED before the 11 Nov cluster as a placement inference, documented as such, on novelty grounds: in 114 both Schacht and Pemulis are surprised by the blindfold and ask about it, whereas by 11 Nov it is familiar ambient (worn unremarked at dinner, 122; "no one asks him about it," 138). A subtler continuity argument — the handkerchief "demoted" to neckwear by 138 — is NOT a valid bound: the object state oscillates (he is blindfolded again on 20 Nov, 183), so no monotonic active-blindfold phase exists. This is an ordering inference, not a date; 114 could sit anywhere in the first third of November, and the book gives it no earlier bound at all.
- Age contradiction (carried unresolved). Scene 034's narration introduces him as "fourteen" (3 Nov); in scene 114 he says "I am Trivially thirteen and not yet required to grapple in hard science" (? Nov). Both recorded, as printed. (If 114 preceded 3 Nov the strain would ease, but nothing supports so early a placement.)
- Port Washington win (3) is reported, not shown. The 11/7 WETA broadcast reads the result out; 036 (3 Nov) has the singles still upcoming, bracketing the match to ~4-7 Nov. Other scenes' headers date the P.W.T.A. trip itself 6-7 Nov (067; 055), though this event's stamp stays the wider ~4-7 Nov bracket.
- 11 Nov internal ordering (7-9). The shit-detail occurred "that P.M." but is disclosed only after the evening viewing (140 follows 138); the event itself (afternoon) is ordered before the 1810h supper and the viewing. The drift-in at the viewing (9) is plausibly the same visit as the bringing-Blott-to-Hal of event 7 — the text invites but never states the identity; flagged, not asserted.
- The urine deal is open. Event 6's arrangement is implied in dialogue and never shown consummated; no later scene of his attests urine changing hands. The Pemulis-side testing crisis (the O.N.A.N.T.A. urologist) belongs to Pemulis's timeline.
- Ethnicity kept at altitude. Narration: "ethnically vague" (034). Dialogue: Pemulis's "little Pakistani RAM-cells" gibe, Arslanian's own "my home nation" / "my home culture" and devout-Muslim self-description (114). No canonical origin is stated by the narration; the Pakistani datum stays attributed to Pemulis's gibe.
- Trivial variance, carried as written: "hot-doggish" smell (036) vs smell "of hot dogs" (138).
- Dymphna's age sits inside a known puzzle. Arslanian relays Thorp's scouting of Dymphna as "age only nine" (114); the archive's Dymphna entry carries the 9-in-YDAU vs 16-in-YG discrepancy as authorial. Arslanian only reports the scouting; the puzzle is not his.