Hal in the Headmaster's waiting room (pp. 527–528)
the scrubbed young button-nosed urologist in an O.N.A.N.T.A. blazer, severely underdue at E.T.A., seated back in the shadow of the open inner door in the room’s southeast corner, so he’s hidden right behind them from the start
Context
The performing bodies are valuable enough to require a hidden guardian, and the mechanism runs on urine and diddle-checks. The whole scene is braced by the apparatus of protecting the young athletes as assets — the mandatory monthly "diddle-checks" against Phielyism, and here the concealed urologist waiting behind the door to certify the bodies. It is the flip side of Tavis's "high-velocity object" pitch: if the children are being made into watchable, projectable commodities, then the commodity must be surveilled, its purity (chemical, sexual) monitored by a specialist kept literally in shadow. The performing body under the audience's gaze is simultaneously the body under the institution's guard — watched from the stands as spectacle, watched from the corner as property. The hidden urologist is the quiet emblem of what it costs to be the object people project themselves onto: you are never not being watched, and some of the watching is done by a man with a specimen cup behind the door.