Pages 109–121

30 April Y.D.A.U. — Marathe and Steeply · first-time reader guide · all scenes

When you've finished these pages: three things worth a second look, at the bottom.

Still 3 November at E.T.A. — the unstructured forty-five minutes before dinner, when the Big Buddy sessions described on p. 98 actually convene. The camera circulates: Hal's quintet sprawls in Viewing Room 6 against a muted loop of textbook forehands, then the scene hops to Wayne's group, Pemulis's, Schacht's, Troeltsch's (he's still sick in bed from pp. 60–61), Struck's, and Stice's. Twelve pages, a dozen named kids, no plot — this is the fullest tour yet of how the academy raises its children, with Hal's private mathematics running underneath.

Terms, in order of appearance

SyberVision (p. 110) — real brand of sports-visualization tapes; here a cartridge loop you're supposed to disappear into.
Stan Smith (p. 110) — real tennis champion of the 1970s, "graying and somewhat ravaged-looking" on the loop.
tincture of benzoin (p. 111) — real callus-hardening resin; endnote 46 ranks it above even Lemon Pledge in player universality.
E Unibus Pluram (p. 112) — Ingersoll's Latin flip of E Pluribus Unum: out of one, many.
WhataBurger Invitational (p. 113) — an upcoming junior tournament in Tucson, sponsored by the real burger chain.
Kodiak (p. 114) — real chewing tobacco; Hal's cover story for needing to spit.
plateaux (p. 115) — French plural of plateau; Wayne's one insistence is the X.
two-card monte (p. 116) — Pemulis's shrunken version of the street con three-card monte.
C.P.S. (p. 118) — Troeltsch's unexpanded abbreviation; from context, the body's central processing — "the machine-language of the muscles."
kertwanging (p. 118) — coinage: doing an opponent dirty inside the rules; Struck's seminar topic.

After you read: three things

1. Hal's answer to a scared ten-year-old is the keystone (pp. 111–113). Blott dreads years of suffering; Hal builds to: "We're each deeply alone here. It's what we all have in common, this aloneness." Then the turn — the nightly group-bitching is engineered: "This is their gift to us. Their medicine. Nothing brings you together like a common enemy." Watch Hal's reaction to himself: what unsettles him is discovering he "really for the most part believes what he's said."

2. Hop the rooms and hear one gospel in six voices. Wayne, via LaMont Chu's index cards: "With an X. Plateaux." — and the three types who wash out on them. Troeltsch: "The point of repetition is there is no point," strokes sinking in until "The court might as well be inside you." Struck fields cheating questions with donnish gravity; Stice channels Schtitt whole — "I'd chew fiberglass for that old man." Even Pemulis's rigged card game is a lesson. The scene is the institution catechizing its young, room by room.

3. Hal's secret channel keeps cutting in. Mid-lecture the narration returns to his private arithmetic: the dinnertime spit-flood blamed on Kodiak, and the brooding admission that "he gets off on the secrecy of getting high in secret more than on the getting high itself, possibly" (p. 114). The coda hands him this stretch's standing question in his own idiom: "is there a clear line, a quantifiable difference between need and just strong desire" (p. 121) — Erdedy (pp. 17–27) and Kate Gompert (pp. 68–78) were the worked examples. Last line of the scene: a twinge in a tooth.

Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.