Pages 198–200
6 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, 1610h, the E.T.A. weight room: a two-page ensemble tableau, all present tense and roll call. Lyle — the sweat-licking towel-dispenser guru from pp. 127–128 — is bent in close, counseling a moist Graham Rader; Freer and a steroidic fifteen-year-old bellow over barbell curls; Hal does ankle rehab on a shelf, spitting into an old NASA glass; Pemulis sits on the cooler bench doing facial isometrics and eavesdropping. Nothing happens except a lift and a parable. That's the scene; it's built on the counterpoint.
Terms, in order of appearance
- "The Viking" (p. 198) — Freer's nickname; endnote 68 explains who actually coined and circulates it.
- NASA glass (p. 198) — an old promotional drinking glass; the spitting it catches is the wintergreen Kodiak plug from p. 53.
- Bacon's popes (p. 199) — real: Francis Bacon's smeared, screaming-pope paintings; one of Pemulis's isometric faces.
- mesomorphic (p. 200) — real somatotype term: the naturally muscular build.
After you read: three things
1. The hundred keys (p. 199). Lyle's parable, delivered at near-whisper: a ring of a hundred keys, one of which "will unlock… all you want to be, as a player." Rader, self-described paralyzed perfectionist, says he'd "try every darn one" — meaning he's just agreed to accept 99% error, while "The paralyzed perfectionist you say you are would stand there before that door. Jingling the keys. Afraid to try the first key." The room's only actual coaching, and it's about fear, not muscle.
2. Listen to the registers collide. The parable is cross-cut with the Freer–Kornspan liturgy — "It raped your sister! It killed your fucking mother man!" — and with Carol Spodek's smaller bar going "silently up and down." Three ways of inhabiting a body, one room. The seam between them is Pemulis, wincing at every roar; and the scene's last word is his lean-in whisper to the vein-popped, heaving Kornspan — "Pussy." — cruelty delivered in exactly wisdom's volume.
3. One clause restages pp. 127–128. "Ingersoll at the shoulder-pull, steadily upping the weight against Lyle's advice" (p. 198). Lyle's introduction ended with the demonstration of what happens when you set the shoulder-pull's resistance above your own weight: you rise toward what you're trying to pull down. The tableau is quietly running that lesson again, live, in the background.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.