the locker room before the exhibition: everyone on private autopilot

The whole room drops into rite. The talk itself takes on "a timeless ceremonial aspect," and every body runs its private liturgy — Wayne hunched under a towel-hood working a coin over his knuckles, Shaw thumbing acupressure for a headache, the Csikszentmihalyi kid doing a knees-to-chest piaffer, Arslanian blindfolded and still in a corner. "Everyone had gone into their like autopilot ritual": the pre-competition body knows its own ceremony without being told, each one a separate machine warming itself.