Pages 567–574

Randy Lenz, out at night · first-time reader guide · all scenes

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

A little hall off the tunnel by the E.T.A. weight room, some November evening. Idris Arslanian — a thirteen-year-old player, wearing a blindfold on purpose — collides first with Ted Schacht, then with Mike Pemulis, while behind the weight-room door Anton Doucette weeps through what Pemulis calls an "anxiously depressed" episode, with Lyle and Mario working him back and crueler kids running a betting pool. The register is the difficulty and the joke: the scene is dialogue only, not one line of narration — everything, including who's talking and what bodies are doing, has to arrive inside the speech.

Terms, in order of appearance

Dymphna (p. 567) — blind nine-year-old Iowa prospect, arriving next term; the name flickered once back in the pp. 3–17 opener.
VAPS (p. 567) — endnote 236 glosses the acronym; a quick flip.
dural edema (p. 567) — real condition: swelling around the brain's outer membrane.
the Boot (p. 569) — E.T.A. slang: expulsion for flunking.
insurmagulate (p. 570) — Pemulis for insurmountable.
annulation / DT-cycles (pp. 569–71) — the waste-energy process; the name has floated since p. ~63, and this scene finally explains it.
Loring A.F.B. / Presque Isle (p. 571) — real former Air Force base in far-north Maine.
U-239 → neptunium-239 → plutonium-239 (p. 571) — a real decay chain; the lecture's isotopes are genuine physics.
coprolite plaque / A.E.C. (p. 572) — coprolite is fossilized dung; the Atomic Energy Commission's award for "the energy of waste," rendered in it.
Men's Sanity in Corporate Sterno (p. 572) — Pemulis mangling mens sana in corpore sano; Sterno is canned cooking fuel.
annular chemotherapy (p. 572) — the fictional cure: giving cancer cells cancer; endnote 238 cites the literature.
Eliotical (p. 574) — Hal's coinage, from T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land.

After you read: three things

1. The form is a game — play it. Nobody is described; speakers identify themselves ("It is I, Idris Arslanian"), and Pemulis immediately abuses the convention ("Troeltsch, James L." ... "It's really Mike Pemulis," p. 568). Even action arrives as speech: "I am standing first upon one foot then upon another foot" (p. 572). The blindfolded boy is judging everything by sound — and so, in this scene, are you.

2. The lecture is the answer key to the folklore. Pemulis's "thumbnail lecture" (pp. 570–73) is the plainest mechanics the book has offered for the Concavity: a right triangle of waste and fuel, a fusion so greedily efficient it strips the land into monstrous lushness, and catapults feeding it toxins on prime-number dates. The giant infants and feral herds you got as street myth on pp. 561–62 now have a mechanism. Note who appears mid-lecture: "our own glorious optical Founder, Inc's ex-Da" (p. 572), whose holography made the science survivable.

3. Supply the missing motive at the end. Why would Pemulis suddenly care what a devout boy who's never touched a Substance does with his urine (p. 574)? The scene never says. You already can: the scrubbed young urologist in the O.N.A.N.T.A. blazer, pp. 527–530, and the clock he started. The whole comic bladder-hostage structure — one more question per lavatory plea — has been a negotiation.

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