Pages 964–971

Gately's bed · first-time reader guide · all scenes

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

The E.T.A. boys' locker room, under a shouting caps dateline: IMMEDIATELY PRE-FUNDRAISER-EXHIBITION-FÊTE GAUDEAMUS IGITUR — the snowed-out gala afternoon of 20 November. The narrator is a new voice: an unnamed player speaking as "a couple of us," passing along what the room saw and heard, hearsay included. Around the taping and shaving and rumor-trade, the scene opens out into the academy's beloved legend of how Barry Loach, the trainer working on Hal's ankle, got his job — a story that runs from a Catholic family's clergy quota to nine months in a subway station. Trust the digressions; the legend is the scene.

Terms, in order of appearance

Gaudeamus Igitur (p. 964) — real Latin student hymn, "So Let Us Rejoice"; the fundraiser's name.
fuller's earth (p. 965) — real: absorbent clay powder; grip-drying, like the sawdust others prefer.
Camilla (p. 965) — Virgil's Aeneid: the warrior maiden "of speed and light step"; invoked audibly through the wall.
Fourier Transform (p. 966) — real math: rewriting a signal as frequencies; Traub garbles Hal's usage into "Furrier Transforms."
AirCast (p. 966) — real inflatable ankle brace; final layer of Loach's four-minute ankle ritual.
Lou Gehrig's Disease (p. 968) — real: ALS, progressive nerve death; here a disease "of the spirit."
St. John's Seminary (p. 968) — real Catholic seminary on Comm. Ave., Brighton — down the road from E.T.A.
the Brothers K. (p. 969) — Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov; Alyosha and Ivan are its believing and doubting brothers.
stem (p. 969) — panhandling argot: to beg; a "stem-artist" works a pitch.
Ativan (p. 969) — real anti-anxiety drug; endnote 384 doses Mrs. Loach in Clydesdale units — worth the flip.

After you read: three things

1. The room laughs at a rumor you can read. Word comes down that the arriving Québec opponents look like a "Special-Olympicish Québec adult wheelchair-tennis contingent" (p. 965); a couple of sub-14s scamper out to check and don't come back, and Poutrincourt is unaccountably AWOL. You read pp. 845–46: you know who planned to meet the Québec squads' bus on its way south. The locker room has no way to know that; you do.

2. This morning you were inside Hal; now he arrives as hearsay. The boy whose seventeen supine pages you just read is here seen only from outside — skipping his customary Snickers, saying "moribund," musing that everyone in the room exists as "Fourier Transforms of postures and little routines... call-uppable for rebroadcast," and therefore "erasable. By whom?" (p. 966) — all of it reaching you garbled through Traub and Whale. The gap between Hal inside and Hal as heard has been open since pp. 3–17.

3. The Loach Challenge's terms are worth reading twice. Not spare change: stand at Park Street looking derelict and ask passersby only "to touch him. Just to touch him" (p. 969) — and for nine months the plea is unhearable as anything but a hustle, answered with coins tossed from arm's length. Who finally takes the words at face value, and why his literalism works where nine months of sincerity failed, is the legend's whole payload — and the hand-shaker is someone you know well.

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