IJ study archive

Scene 013: hal pump room

Scene
13
Pages
49–54
When
YDAU (2009), date unspecified — 'the sad little interval after afternoon matches and conditioning but before the Academy's communal supper'
Where
E.T.A. underground: tunnels and the Lung's Pump Room beneath the courts, Enfield MAin: E.T.A. (Enfield Tennis Academy) › E.T.A. tunnels
POV
narrator (3rd person) on Hal, with encyclopedic digressions

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Open questions this scene bears on

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 11)

Summary

Hal, seventeen, gets covertly high with a brass one-hitter in the Pump Room twenty meters under the E.T.A. courts, exhaling into an industrial exhaust fan — and the narration announces the scene's real subject: "a bigger secret is that he's as attached to the secrecy as he is to getting high." Around this hangs a full anatomy of E.T.A.'s underground: the tunnel system and cardioid campus plan (n.3), the Lung and its pulmonary Pump Room, and the school's chemical culture — the 'drines/tranqs/designer taxonomy of nn.5-9 — plus the family epistemology of Avril's performed trust, which works "so that Hal might enjoy the security of feeling that he can be up-front with her" while hiding everything. The scene closes on Hal's own opacity to himself: he broods on the No-One-Must-Know obsession and gets nowhere, "like most North Americans of his generation."

What to notice

The scene opens like an exhibit — "Here's Hal Incandenza, age seventeen" — and instantly makes you the sole confidant: "nobody knows where he is or what he's doing", except the reader, recruited into the very secrecy under study. The narration keeps catching Hal's own register: paraphernalia reviewed in stoner-connoisseur voice ("let's face it, anything you use to smoke high-resin dope with is going to stink"), the efficiency creed typeset as a one-sentence axiom with an equals sign — rationalization dressed as mathematics. The structural joke is the swerve: the scene raises its one live question — Hal has "never given much thought to why. To why he likes it so much." — and then buries it under two pages of tunnel engineering, the prose performing the exact avoidance it describes, entombing the question in infrastructure the way Hal entombs the habit beneath the courts. And that infrastructure is anatomical — a heart-shaped campus, a dome called the Lung, a Pump Room "essentially like a pulmonary organ" — so the school's own body breathes his evidence away for him. Listen, too, to the sentences' trailing tags: Avril's dread "tears her gizzard out, the mother's"; the closing diagnosis peters into "whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency" — clauses that append their subject after the fact, little syntactic afterthoughts in a scene about what gets acknowledged only belatedly, or never.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 49: Hal with the one-hitter in the Pump Room, the pre-supper gap; "a bigger secret is that he's as attached to the secrecy as he is to getting high."
  • pp. 49-50: One-hitter logistics; "Total utilization of available resources = lack of publicly detectable waste"; the Ziploc-and-sock concealment kit.
  • p. 50: Who knows: Pemulis, Struck, Boone, Troeltsch, Schacht, Axford, possibly others; Stice; Mario "knows a thing or two"; Orin "mysteriously, even long-distance, seems to know more than he's coming right out and saying."
  • pp. 50-51: Avril's knowledge-management: she knows about the drinking, reasons (per Rusk) that top performance precludes abuse, and labors to perform unsmothering trust — "all so that Hal might enjoy the security of feeling that he can be up-front with her"; Pemulis "reptilian," Struck "trail-of-slime-leaving" — both giving Avril "a howling case of the maternal fantods" (p. 50); her "black phobic dread of hiding or secrecy in all possible forms with respect to her sons" (p. 51, the Tavis/Rusk private observation); note "her adoptive brother Dr. Charles Tavis" (p. 50) vs. p. 3's "half-brother" — the deliberate kinship wobble the archive records.
  • p. 51: Avril "never leaves the grounds anymore," hunching through the off-tunnels between Headmaster's House and her office — first clear signal of her agoraphobia; Mario's description of Comm.-Ad.: "a cube that has swallowed a ball too big for its stomach."
  • pp. 51-52: The tunnel atlas [nn.3-4]: Comm.-Ad., laundry, prorectors' rooms, JOI's defunct optical/film facilities (repurposed "over four years"; "Leith and Ogilvie and the late Dr. James O. Incandenza"), the TesTar/ATHSCME Lung infrastructure; the Pump Room as upside-down spider and "pulmonary organ" that "roars like a banshee that's slammed its hand in a door" (p. 52); the crude Plant-to-Pump crawl-tunnel "popular only with the Academy's smaller kids' Tunnel Club" (p. 52).
  • pp. 52-53: The routine itself: checking the Physical Plant, crawling with gear bag in teeth, one exhaust fan on, pale exhalation ducted out under the West Courts; winter alternative (lavatory ceiling fans) lacks "intricate subterranean covert drama" — so Hal dreads I.-Day, the WhataBurger, and the Lung's erection.
  • p. 53: E.T.A. chemical sociology [nn.5-9]: 'drines before matches, benzos after, Mild Designers and Black Star weekends — "this circular routine... can work surprisingly well throughout adolescence... before it starts to creep up on you."
  • pp. 53-54: Enforcement is flaccid [n.10]: expulsion on the books, but depressed prorectors get high themselves; "people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away... Some just prefer to do it in secret."
  • p. 54: Post-session toilette (Oral-B, Visine, Old Spice, Kodiak plug); the No-One-Must-Know obsession brooded on and unresolved — explicitly "not fear per se, fear of discovery"; Hal knows the objects of his devotion far better than his reasons.

Endnotes (digested)

  • n.3 (p. 983): the cardioid campus — four inward-facing buildings convex on arcs of the same r, the parking lots the "bashed-in dent" of the Valentine heart; architect A. Y. Rickey of Brandeis, "Avril's old and very dear friend," topology's "closed-curve-mapping-Übermensch," now deceased; his vest-without-removing-jacket parlor trick wowed Hal and Mario in Weston until Pemulis exposed it as exploiting "certain basic features of continuous functions" — Hal mourned the revelation "in a Santa's-not-real type of secret way"; Mario "simply ignored" it, "preferring to see the vest thing as plain magic." (The Hal/Pemulis/Mario epistemic triangle in one anecdote.)
  • n.4 (p. 983): "prorectors" defined — younger staffers doubling as academic and athletic instructors.
  • n.5 + sub-note a (p. 983): the 'drines (Cylert, Tenuate, Fastin, Preludin, Ritalin); Pemulis — out of "maybe some queer sort of" blue-collar street-type honor — rarely 'drining before matches; Tenuate profiled (diethylpropion, post-spike ocular nystagmus); Pemulis hoards every 75-mg. capsule in his "special entrepôt-yachting-cap," sells to no one but sometimes Troeltsch — who also "promotes" more on the sly, "which secret promotions Pemulis knows about all too well, and is biding his time to retaliate, never you fear." First endnote-to-an-endnote in the book; the ledger settles the other way in the end — the room-swap comes at scene 179 (p. 942; setup at scene 167, p. 872), and what detonates is Troeltsch's own deal-cutting over Pemulis in n.332 (p. 1075).
  • n.6 (pp. 983-984): the tranqs (Valium-III, Xanax, Halcion — "legally available in Canada, unbelievably, still"); heavy-slide kids never last, E.R. personnel attributing tranq deaths off the record to "'P.S.' or 'Pulmonary Sloth.'"
  • n.7 (p. 984): alcohol/cocaine economics — hangovers and Dawn Drills police intake better than Staff does; the two neurologic types (engine-revvers vs. edge-bevellers: tranqs, cannabis, barbiturates, "and—yes—alcohol").
  • n.8 + sub-note a (p. 984): the Mild Designer class (psylocibin, Happy Patches, X, homemade methoxy manipulations) — pointedly NOT including the CNS-rattlers: STP, DOM, "Grievous Bodily Harm," LSD-25 or -32, "or DMZ/M.P." — the novel's first naming of DMZ, with its Madame-Psychosis street alias already attached (the archive's DMZ entry). Sub-note a: homemade transdermals "usually MDMA or Muscimole" — cf. Pemulis's muscimole colloquium (scene 022).
  • n.9 (p. 984): Black Star = LSD-25 with a 'drine kicker, New Bedford supply; "Bridgeport CT, which is the true lower intestine of North America, Bridgeport, be advised, if you've never been through there."
  • n.10 (p. 984): the "gentle fiction" that 100% of students enroll at their own volition — tennis-parents "bad news indeed."

Themes in this scene

  • Addiction and Recovery: Hal's habit presented at the stage of perfect functionality — the secrecy-attachment and ritual apparatus are textbook early-Erdedy (scene 004); the "creep up on you" clause is the fuse.
  • Communication and Solipsism: secrecy as Hal's true substance; "give themselves away" puns connection and surrender; he cannot explain himself to himself.
  • Family and Hamlet: Avril's trust-performance is the family's communication pathology institutionalized — a mother engineering the feeling of openness that guarantees concealment; her secrecy-phobia (p. 51) makes Hal's tunnels a precision rebellion.
  • The Body and Tennis: the Lung, the cardioid campus (n.3), drills-to-supper rhythms — the body's regimen generates both the stress and the architecture (literal heart-shape, literal lung) that the habit hides inside.
  • Annularity: "Total utilization of available resources = lack of publicly detectable waste" is annular-fusion logic applied to getting high; the up-down chemical "circular routine" (p. 53) is the cycle in miniature.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • Avril's epistemology here is the prose version of scene 010's flag parable — both brothers modeling what the Moms knows and performs.
  • JOI's repurposed optics rooms (p. 51) — the dead father's film infrastructure literally underlies the campus; the master-cartridge questions of the endgame (and the YG grave-digging, scene 003) turn on what JOI left where.

Forward

  • Endnote 8's drug taxonomy pointedly excludes "DMZ/M.P." from the mild class — the novel's first naming of the incredibly potent DMZ, the compound at the center of Pemulis's plan and a leading theory of YG Hal (scenes 001/003; nn.321-324, pp. 1063-1072).
  • Endnote 5 plants the Pemulis Tenuate hoard and Troeltsch's secret pilfering, paid off in the Troeltsch/Pemulis subplot near the end (scene 179, p. 942; n.332).
  • Endnote 3's cardioid design (architect A.Y. Rickey, Avril's "old and very dear friend") adds to the Avril-intimates dossier and gives the campus its heart shape — body-as-map (cf. maps-territory scenes later).
  • Hal's marijuana thread runs to his decision to quit (scene 157, p. 784; n.321's 12-Nov conversation), the withdrawal that may explain YG; the Pump Room itself recurs in Hal's YDAU secret-smoking (pp. 518, 521, scene 102; the confession to Mario at p. 782, scene 157; n.281) — the urine problem and the Pemulis crisis play out in Tavis's office and the deLint/Watson/Nwangi interview, not down here.
  • The Tunnel Club (p. 52) recurs as the sub-14s' institution of the Eschaton orbit (pp. 666-673, scene 129; founder Heath Pearson per p. 899, scene 170) — and the tunnels themselves are the route of the late E.T.A. material (Hal's pre-WhataBurger wanderings, the Pemulis crisis).
  • Avril "never leaves the grounds anymore" (p. 51) seeds the agoraphobia/Headmaster's-House confinement that the Joelle Thanksgiving (pp. 745-747) and n.269's counter-dossier elaborate.
  • Carlisle-flagged (recorded, his readings): "Avril I." as an April 1 name-pun (Avril = French April; JOI's suicide and the attaché's viewing both 1 April); the un-"wring her fine hands" diction as Hamlet III.iv ("Leave wringing of your hands") in the trust paragraph; the "eight" prorectors (main text, p. 53; n.4 context) counting only the male prorectors.

Notable passages (10)
  • p. 49: "a bigger secret is that he's as attached to the secrecy as he is to getting high." — thesis.
  • p. 49: "Total utilization of available resources = lack of publicly detectable waste." — annularity as personal hygiene.
  • pp. 50-51: the Avril trust paragraph ("works tremendously hard to hide her maternal dread... so that Hal might enjoy the security...") — family-hamlet core text.
  • p. 53: "American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away..." — the book's worship thesis in its first full statement.
  • p. 54: "Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves." — the generation's diagnosis.
  • p. 51: "a cube that has swallowed a ball too big for its stomach" — Mario on Comm.-Ad.; the campus described by its gentlest eye.
  • p. 50: "give Avril a howling case of the maternal fantods" — the family idiom (cf. Orin's "howling fantods," p. 45, scene 012); Avril characterized through what she performs not-having.
  • p. 52: "roars like a banshee that's slammed its hand in a door" — the Pump Room; E.T.A.'s underground as living anatomy.
  • p. 53: "this circular routine... can work surprisingly well throughout adolescence... before it starts to creep up on you." — the chemical cycle's fuse.
  • n.9, p. 984: "Bridgeport CT, which is the true lower intestine of North America" — the endnotes' own comic voice; worth carrying into any drug-taxonomy anthology with the nn.5-9 cluster.

What links here Manuscript differences (1) · Timeline events here (26) · Connected from (23) · Passages quoted here (33) · Motifs (4)

Manuscript differences

Timeline events here

Connected from

Passages quoted here

Motifs