Pages 60–61
3 NOVEMBER, YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT — deep autumn of the year the book keeps circling. Room 204, Subdormitory B, at the tennis academy: Jim Troeltsch, seventeen, #2 singles on the 18's B-team, has been taken suddenly ill and put himself back to bed. His name, and his roommates' — Pemulis and Schacht — all appeared in the who-knows-Hal-gets-high roster on p. 50; this is the first time any of them gets a scene of his own. One habit defines him instantly: he watches tennis cartridges with the sound off, calling the action into his fist like a broadcaster.
Terms, in order of appearance
- meatus (p. 60) — real anatomy: a passage or canal; here, the head's clogged ones.
- the paranoid king (p. 60) — a poster of Pemulis's, hung so you can't watch the viewer without seeing it; endnote 21 hangs off it.
- Seldane (p. 60) — real 1990s prescription antihistamine; endnote 22's gloss is one line and worth the flip.
- Tenuate (p. 60) — stimulant diet pill; profiled back in endnote 5 (keyed at p. 53).
- dextromethorphan (p. 61) — real cough suppressant, here wanted in nebulizer-mist form.
- fugue-state (p. 61) — psychiatry: a dissociated, drifting state; the scene applies it to fever-sleep.
- prolix (p. 61) — long-winded, going on and on; applied here, oddly and perfectly, to folds of cloth.
After you read: three things
1. The same word, three pages apart, retuned. A "plain old human rhinovirus" just killed a man in a kitchen chair (p. 56); now "It’s definitely a rhinovirus, the sudden severe kind" (p. 60) — and this time it's farce: clotted Kleenex, self-diagnosed fever, cosmic retributions called down on a suspected sneezer. The book's hard cuts keep rhyming like this (recliner to camcorder, suffocation to sniffle); the echo is structural, not accidental.
2. Nested pretending, nested stashes. Troeltsch suspects Graham Rader "might have really sneezed and only pretended to pretend" (p. 60) — a three-layer sneeze. Meanwhile his Seldane bottle secretly holds Tenuate capsules "promoted" from Pemulis, hidden "in bold plain sight" (p. 60). If you flipped endnote 5 back at p. 53, you know something Troeltsch doesn't: the owner of those capsules is already onto the promotions, and is biding his time. The Pump Room's secrecy theme (pp. 49–54), replayed in farce key.
3. Watch the scene dissolve rather than end. The itemized comedy slides into fever-texture: the vaporizer's digestive sounds, balls popping like distant champagne corks, "enormous ATHSCME displacement fans far up north at the wall and border" (p. 61) — the Lung-company of p. 52 apparently running something vastly bigger, at a wall the scene doesn't explain. Then the fugue: dreams "ragged at the edges, gnawed on, incomplete," waking convinced "there’s someone unauthorized in the dorm room with you" — the prose slipping into you as the fever comes on.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.