The Port Washington meet
Now after Wayne’s balletic winner there’s the sad sound of a small crowd behind glass’s applause; on the courts the applause is muffled and compromised by on-court sounds, and sounds like the trapped survivors of something tapping for help at a great depth. The panel is like an aquarium’s glass, thick and clean, and traps noise behind it, and to the gallery it seems that 72 well-muscled children are arrayed and competing in total silence in the pit.
Context
The meet is watched entirely through apparatus: a thick gallery panel that turns 72 children into a silent exhibit and turns applause into trapped survivors tapping from a great depth. Carlisle collects this with deLint's nose squashed flat against the glass as the scene's entombed-spectation cluster — spectation as something done through glass, at the watched party's expense; his reading, recorded not adopted.