the Headmaster’s waiting room (pp. 519–520)

Tavis rendered as a problem in perspective. He's small "less endocrine than perspectival," a man who looks like something receding even as it bears down — which is why Ortho Stice's devastating C.T.-impression is just a hand shielding the eyes in a horizon-scan whenever Tavis "heaves into view, seeming to recede even as he bears down." The endnotes push the joke to its limit: E.T.A. lore holds that the dead founder's own wide-angle side-mirrors, the ones stamped Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, were inspired by the always-foreshortened Tavis; and the office StairBlaster he runs on is a sadistic down-escalator dickied to hurl its rider backwards across the room unless he climbs for his life. The successor as an optical anomaly and a man perpetually running in place to keep from being thrown back — the compulsion (the same "Total Worry" he chants alone on the machine) made geometry.