Pages 65–66
A dateline: DENVER CO, 1 NOVEMBER, YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT — two days before Troeltsch's sickbed morning (p. 60), so the book's main year is now running on a real calendar. Orin Incandenza, the Phoenix punter of pp. 42–49, is airborne over Mile High Stadium in a fake-red-feathered cardinal costume, gliding down into a football crowd as pregame spectacle, screaming his objections to anyone in earshot. Two pages, pure comedy on the surface, and short enough to read twice.
Terms, in order of appearance
- Mile High (p. 65) — Denver's real stadium, a literal mile up; hence updrafts you can glide on.
- holder (p. 65) — football: the man who holds the ball for place-kicks; here a sad old ex-quarterback, gliding alongside.
- token females (p. 65) — the promotional flock apparently requires hens; the holder is assigned as one, blunter beak and all.
- robes and halos, and a zither (p. 66) — his old team was New Orleans: Saints. The costume logic tracks.
- an Oiler… a Brown (p. 66) — real NFL franchises; the holder's consolation invites you to picture their promo flights.
After you read: three things
1. The cut is the joke, and the joke is not only a joke. The paragraph before this was the father's obituary — posthumous citations, a festschrift, "a great loss in at least three worlds" (p. 65). Hard cut: the eldest son in a bird suit, shedding ill-glued feathers, yelling "I hate this!" (p. 65). The book keeps making meaning out of adjacency, and this is its bluntest instance yet: the honored dead father; the flying, humiliated son.
2. Listen to the crowd's acoustics. The updraft Orin rides is "the oxides from Mile-High’s thousands of open mouths" — the crowd's own breath holds the spectacle up. And "it starts sounding like the crowd’s roaring at its own roar, a doubling-back quality like something’ll blow" (p. 65): an audience feeding on itself, cameras with a Zoom-light Orin knows "too well." The athletes have been absorbed into the entertainment apparatus, costume and all; his protest names it exactly: "I’m an athlete! I’m not a freak-show performer!" (p. 66).
3. You know something the whole team doesn't. "Orin has told no Cardinal, not even the team’s counselor and visualization-therapist, about his morbid fear of heights" (pp. 65–66) — a fear you were handed flat on p. 45, in the list of his special conscious horrors. So every grim tack across the sky is worse than his teammates can see. And the whispered prayer before each touchdown — "Please Lord, spare the Leg" (p. 66) — capitalizes the body part: a man reduced, in his own liturgy, to custodian of one monetized limb.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.