Pages 283–299

Orin's story · first-time reader guide · all scenes

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

No date header this time: sixteen pages of backfill, the narrator unspooling how Hal's eldest brother Orin — the cockroach-and-tumblers man of pp. 42–49, the phone voice of pp. 242–58 — got from E.T.A. tennis to professional punting. The sweep runs from his senior year at the Academy through Boston University, a freshman-week defection from tennis to football, and the one serious romance of his life, with a name you know: Joelle van Dyne. A long Charles Tavis monologue mid-scene is exhausting by design. Everything here happened years before the book's present.

Terms, in order of appearance

C.U.S.P. / Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner (p. 283) — a fringe party and its crooner; by p. 288 he has an "administration"; the names are all you get.
Full Ride (p. 285) — athletic scholarship; endnote 97 unpacks what accepting one means at E.T.A.
felo de se (p. 286) — legal Latin for suicide, literally "felon of oneself."
TE OCCIDERE POSSUNT… (p. 286) — Latin, "they can kill you…": the old E.T.A. motto from the p. 153 truck door, quoted only this far.
strabismic (p. 289) — cross-eyed; the doubles partner's defining trait and, he'd say, his credential in unattainability.
Actaeon Complex (p. 290) — from the real myth: Actaeon glimpsed the goddess bathing and was destroyed by his own hounds; fear of transhuman beauty.
U.H.I.D. (p. 290) — the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed, from the pp. 184–85 radio broadcast; dropped here without comment.
attar (p. 290) — real word: flower-essence oil. Joelle's is dandelion, decocted by her chemist Daddy in Shiny Prize, Kentucky.
ephebe (p. 292) — Greek: a youth on the cusp of manhood; Orin phones his youngest brother to look it up.
coffin-corner (p. 294) — real punting art: dropping the ball dead near the corner by the opponent's goal line.

After you read: three things

1. This is the file behind the phone call. The P.G.O.A.T. acronym Orin and Hal tossed around on pp. 242–58 gets coined and unpacked here (p. 289), and the shunned baton-twirler it names carries the same particulars — Joelle van Dyne, Kentucky chemist's daughter, an East Cambridge co-op — as the veiled woman of pp. 219–23. The scene stays in the past; you arrived knowing more than it tells. Note who starts filming whom by the end, and the quiet line about Himself: "the end's start, gradually, in hindsight" (p. 297).

2. Schtitt already has Orin's number. The punt arrives like destiny — first kick of Orin's life, a blocked ball rolling to him too far to throw back (pp. 291–92), right after the narrator's riff that "Destiny has no beeper" (p. 291). Then Schtitt, watching tape in the Viewing Room, files the dissent: Orin is "still just only lobbing" (pp. 293–94) — his one over-relied-on E.T.A. weapon, relocated to a game that calls dependence on it genius. The scene hands you miracle and diagnosis both; hold both.

3. Watch Orin with a crowd, then with a screen. His ecstasy is being watched: "30,000 voices, souls, voicing approval as One Soul" (p. 295), the only sound in which he can't hear himself think. The last page inverts it — Orin, indifferent to nearly all spectation, alone with the lights dimmed, re-running Joelle's ten-second clips of himself, frozen right before impact: "Of particular interest are the eyes." (p. 299). The scene chooses to end there.

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