Pages 127–128
Two pages, undated, habitual tense — "he's always in there." The place is the E.T.A. weight room; the subject is a resident guru who sits in full lotus on the towel dispenser, licks sweat off willing students, and dispenses conditioning wisdom in return. It's a portrait, not an event, told entirely in campus lore: nobody knows where he comes from or why he's allowed to stay, only that he "supposedly went way back" with the Academy's late founder. Odd as the arrangement sounds, the scene treats it as wholly benign, and means it.
Terms, in order of appearance
- full lotus (p. 127) — the cross-legged yogic meditation posture.
- DEUS PROVIDEBIT (p. 128) — Latin, on the tank top's back: God will provide.
After you read: three things
1. Notice who's talking. For the first time in a while the narrator is an "I" — an unnamed E.T.A. student voicing communal knowledge: "is the consensus," "supposedly," "they say." The introduction runs backward: two pages of iconography and lore first, and then the last line finally hands over a name, still hedged — "His name is supposedly Lyle." Let the voice's hedges register; this is how the academy knows the things it knows.
2. The shoulder-pull parable is gym advice built to outlive the gym. Lyle's commandment: "Let not the weight thou wouldst pull to thyself exceed thine own weight." The skeptics who overload the machine get hoisted by their own pull — "Everyone should get at least one good look at the eyes of a man who finds himself rising toward what he wants to pull down to himself." You've now heard this idea three ways in twenty-odd pages: choose your attachments with care (pp. 106–108), the tripod that only turns up un-looked-for (p. 126), and here as literal physics. Want more than your own weight, and the wanting lifts you off your feet.
3. Watch what the scene refuses to do with its own weirdness. A Spandex guru who "lives off the sweat of others. Literally." should be a creep joke, and the newer kids read him that way. The narration doesn't: the advice is solid, the tongue "isn't like a faggy or sexual thing," he's "harmless as they come" — and his stillness gets the scene's most admiring line, "Everything he sees hits him and sinks without bubbles." The narrator's closing wish — "to just sit all quiet and pull life toward me, one forehead at a time" — is offered straight. Take it straight.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.