Pages 66–67
Undated weekday, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, the pre-dinner slot at the tennis academy: a Viewing Room full of little kids sitting cross-legged on the floor, and Michael Pemulis — much referenced, never yet on stage — lecturing them, from memory, on the pharmacology of a psychedelic mushroom. That's the whole scene: two pages, one joke structure, played completely straight. You've been prepared for this man by rumor only; here he is in the flesh, mid-colloquium.
Terms, in order of appearance
- muscimole (p. 66) — real psychoactive compound (usually spelled muscimol); the fly agaric's active ingredient.
- Amanita muscaria / fly agaric (p. 66) — the real storybook mushroom, red cap with white spots.
- phalloides / verna (p. 66) — real and genuinely lethal Amanita cousins: the death cap and the destroying angel.
- synesthesia (p. 66) — senses crossing: hearing colors, tasting sounds.
- Big Buddy (p. 66) — the Academy's program pairing upperclassmen with little kids; the scene glosses it as it subverts it.
- Hasidically (p. 67) — rocking and bobbing like Hasidic Jews at prayer.
- titrated (p. 67) — dosed carefully, by increments.
After you read: three things
1. The rumors assemble into a person. Avril classed him "reptilian" (p. 50); endnote 5 (keyed at p. 53) revealed his Tenuate hoard and his patience about being stolen from; p. 60 gave him a paranoid-king poster and Troeltsch for a roommate. Now his entrance: a graduate-level chemistry lecture delivered "not reading or referring to notes in any way" (p. 66), precise to the milligram and the molecule. The expertise is loving. That combination — devotion, command, and the subject being drugs — is Pemulis.
2. Hold the frame against the content. "This is supposed to be a pre-dinner ‘Big Buddy’ powwow, where the littler kids receive general big-brotherly-type support and counsel from an upperclassman." (p. 66). What the slot actually carries is dosage guidance and a safety warning about lethal look-alikes. And this isn't abstract scholarship: endnote 8's fine print (keyed at p. 53) already listed muscimole among the school's own homemade patch ingredients. The counsel is real; it's just not the kind the institution had in mind.
3. Nobody in the room receives a word. Glassy eyes, tennis-ball squeezing, rocking "to stay alert," a navel probed "with great interest," one kid in a fake-antennae hat, one pretending to fall over; the screen's block capitals "might as well be Greek to the Little Buds" (p. 67). A lecture with no listeners — the book's talking-past-each-other problem in its lightest key yet. One aside deserves a beat: the mushroom was revered by "the aboriginal tribes of what’s now southern Québec and the Great Concavity" (p. 67) — what's now: that renamed territory (p. 59) casually swallowed real map.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.