the conversationalist: the ranked prodigy who also recites the dictionary

Hal's own thumbnail of himself, offered to the "professional conversationalist," yokes the two prodigy-bodies that define him: "a continentally ranked junior tennis player who can also recite great chunks of the dictionary, verbatim, at will." The tennis-body and the lexical-body are billed in the same breath, a matched pair of freakish outputs — and both, he notes, get him "beat up." The athletic gift is presented as one talent among his oddities, ranked and continental, the body's worth measured on the same scale as the memory's. It's the anthology's core figure in miniature: the kid who is a ranking.