Trust math, locker room (p. 1071)

Pemulis is the kid's Big Buddy — E.T.A.'s institutional stand-in for an older brother or a father — and he steps straight into the hole the real father just opened, offering a dependability you actually can trust: math. The whole riff ("trust to the abstract deductive," "the nightlight on life's dark wall") is a surrogate-father's bedside consolation, and its selling point is exactly that math, unlike a dad, is "always and ever," "independent of sense or emotionality," incapable of restructuring the deal. Then he caps it with the line the scene has been building toward — "Never trust the father you can see" — dropped at the precise instant word reaches the room that John Wayne, another fatherless scholarship kid, is "losing his mind" on air. The insight is that the substitute father's best gift is counsel to stop needing the literal one: relocate your trust from the man who can welch to a structure that can't. [substitution]