the Bain transcript: you are what you walk between
the E.T.A. staff indulged Bain’s pathology about doorways because Schtitt’s own mentor had been pathologically devoted to this idea that you are what you walk between
Context
The body-doctrine's lineage surfaces in an aside. The academy tolerates Marlon Bain's doorway-compulsion out of deference to Schtitt's own mentor — the garage-gospel source (cf. 049) — who "had been pathologically devoted to this idea that you are what you walk between." The E.T.A. creed didn't originate with Schtitt; it descends from a teacher for whom traversal itself was identity, and the staff honors the inheritance by indulging a boy who can't cross a threshold without checking its whole frame by hand.