John Wayne

Arc

Wayne is the novel's finished product — the thing E.T.A. exists to manufacture, exhibited to us almost entirely from the outside. The machine has a price tag attached: a Montcerf asbestos miner at forty-three, triple-masked, holding on until his son can "take him away from all this" (1), and a country that responded to the son's American recruitment by revoking his citizenship, so that the father cannot legally watch him play (3). What the price bought is the book's purest tennis instrument: "a kind of automatic beauty," a boy who tracks lobs with his back turned, whose emotions emerge "in terms of velocity," whose play "seems to Schacht less alive than undead" (5) — #1 in the school, the one player Hal has never beaten (4, 16), aimed by deLint "like a fucking missile at the Show" (15). His doctrine, the one time we hear it at length, is the plateaux: mastery not as talent but as temperament, humble repetitive slog, spelled "With an X" (6). Around the game there is almost no person visible at all — the top button buttoned over no tie, the morose expatriate table, the head in Hal's doorway that appears, says nothing, and smoothly withdraws (5, 7).

The silence breaks exactly twice, and both breaks are somebody else's doing. The first is the Avril liaison, which the timeline gets only through other eyes: the wild-dog suppers at the Headmaster's House (8), Pemulis walking in on the football-helmet-and-cheerleader tableau (13), Hal's flat 20-Nov statement — "involved with the Moms sexually since roughly the second month after his arrival. They were both expatriates" (14) — and finally the affair converted to blackmail currency, Pemulis's urinalysis shield (19). Wayne never speaks to any of it; even in the act he dresses "with no little dignity," silent. The second break is chemical: dosed with Pemulis's Tenuate he believed was Seldane, Wayne "lost his mind" on the WETA air (18) — and what the amphetamine uncorks from the ironyless exile is a torrent of savage, accurate candor, a Tavis impression that outclasses Stice's and a name-by-name audit of the whole Academy. The cause is disputed as the text disputes it (the school's decongestant-allergy story vs. Pemulis's private knowledge), but the shape is the point: the two times the automatic shows an interior, it is Avril's staging and Pemulis's pill — never his own choice, never his own voice.

What the book does with him last is make the watcher literal and refuse every explanation. In-range he exits hooded on a locker-room bench, coin walking over his knuckles, Joni Mitchell playing low (20), dressed to vivisect Québec's junior team for E.T.A.'s patrons (11) — the exile playing his homeland for sport. A year out, the Year-of-Glad frame gives him one sentence: "John N. R. Wayne, who would have won this year's WhataBurger, standing watch in a mask as Donald Gately and I dig up my father's head" (21). The past-conditional strips him of the tournament that was the family's whole exit plan (10), and the mask puts the doorway-head at a grave that happens to be the presumed site of the Entertainment's Master. Both cruxes stay open here as the book builds them: what became of him, and whose side, if any side, the watching serves — the A.F.R. reading resting on inference all the way down (the revoked citizenship, deLint's keep-Steeply-off-him, scene 147's unnamed "student already inside," the masked dig), the against-reading resting on Schacht's quiet verdict that Wayne is "an all-business entertainer, citizen of the world" (22). The spine records the evidence and stops where the novel stops: a masked man at a grave, allegiance unstated, silence intact.