Pages 851–854
New dateline: 20 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT, with a motto attached — GAUDEAMUS IGITUR. It's before 0500h in Hal and Mario's room; Mario sleeps, a blizzard is burying the West Courts, and Hal stands his prescribed fifteen ankle-therapy minutes on one foot at the window in the dark. Today is the annual Fundraiser: an exhibition meet against two touring Québec junior squads, then a gala. One structural note — Hal is narrating in the first person, "I," for the first sustained stretch since the book's opening pages (pp. 3–17).
Terms, in order of appearance
- GAUDEAMUS IGITUR (p. 851) — real medieval student song: "so let us rejoice, while we are still young."
- the Boards (p. 851) — endnote 344: the E.T.S. Advanced Placement subject tests; Hal's are three weeks out, at B.U.'s C.B.S. building (endnote 345).
- Jr. Davis / Jr. Wightman Cup (p. 853) — real tennis: the men's and women's national-team cups; these are Québec's junior squads.
- M.I.A.–D'Orval (p. 853) — endnote 346: Montréal's international airport (the real Dorval).
- terre-batu (p. 853) — French terre battue, "beaten earth": clay courts; hence the European clay-fest.
- Penn 4 (p. 853) — a real Penn-brand tennis ball; Hal's November hand-strengthening ball.
After you read: three things
1. The new voice reports flat weather inside. Hal wakes from "a zoo" with no animals or cages, with "a sort of nausea of the head," having needed for almost a week to cry — "the tears were somehow stopping just millimeters behind my eyes and staying there. And so on." When "a kind of cold hope flared" that the blizzard means cancellation, the backlash is worse than the hope: he has never before wanted not to play. And he asks the withdrawal question straight: "whether the Bob Hope had somehow become not just the high-point of the day but its actual meaning. That would be pretty appalling." The unsqueezed Penn 4 sits there as evidence.
2. You know two things Hal doesn't say. Pemulis was "suspiciously generous" with two weeks of Boards math tutoring, then went scarce "since the Wayne debacle" — endnote 332 (hanging off p. 795) already told you about the WETA broadcast disaster and what it cost Pemulis; Hal's narration stays oddly incurious. And Hal's "improbable that anything was going to be landing on time at Logan" lands differently when you recall that the Québec squads' bus is exactly what Balbalis's mirror crew drove north through this same storm to meet (pp. 845–846).
3. The answering machines are a comedy of absent bodies. No music, no bits, no video phones under C.T. — just Stice's lethal 80-second C.T. impression, Pemulis's recursive screen ("leave a second-order message at the sound of the clapping hand"), worn so thin no caller who matters will leave a name, and Hal's honesty-week outgoing message: "This is the disembodied voice of Hal Incandenza, whose body is not now able…" — a joke that is, this particular week, simply true.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.