the locker room: trust math

The book's great ironist caught, unmistakably, being earnest — and the sincerity is at once ridiculous and genuinely true. Pemulis, the Eschaton-master and drug-dealer whose face is a "brass mask" (155), drops all of it to deliver a real sermon to a crying kid: "you can trust math." Deductive truth, "independent of sense or emotionality," the one dependable father when the visible one welches ("Never trust the father you can see"). It builds to unembarrassed liturgy — "When driven to your knees, kneel and revere the double S. Leap like a knight of faith into the arms of Peano, Leibniz, Hilbert, L'Hôpital. You will be lifted up." The register-achievement is that it's simultaneously absurd (a math-evangelism aria delivered by a half-dressed hood while Freer mocks from the mirror) and completely sincere and, crucially, true — the parametric-equations quote really does hold "always and ever." Pemulis means it, and means it about the one thing that can't be constructed-instead-of-reported. The ironist's one earnest sermon is for the only truth irony can't dissolve.