IJ study archive

Scene 018: troeltsch sick in bed

Scene
18
Pages
60–61
When
3 Nov YDAU (2009), morning (illness onset at 0745 drills)
Where
Rm. 204, Subdormitory B, E.T.A.in: E.T.A. (Enfield Tennis Academy) › E.T.A. subdormitories
POV
3rd person over Jim Troeltsch

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 8)

Summary

Jim Troeltsch, seventeen, #2 singles on the 18's B-team, is felled "ultra-fast and out of the pre-drill blue" by a sudden rhinovirus and retreats to bed, watching a recorded U.S. Open match without calling the action into his fist as he usually does. He suspects Graham Rader of having "pretended to pretend" to sneeze on his lunch tray. He has bribed roommate Pemulis (with breakfast rights) to fetch Seldane and a drill excuse, while his own bedside Seldane bottle secretly holds Tenuate capsules pilfered from Pemulis and hidden in plain sight. The scene dissolves into a feverish fugue-state half-sleep — dreams "ragged at the edges, gnawed on, incomplete" — under the Turkish blanket-thing glued to the ceiling, with the distant roar of the ATHSCME border fans and the pock of cold balls below.

What to notice

The joke of the telling is that Troeltsch — the boy who calls match action into his fist — gets his illness narrated in his own broadcast style: portentous short landings ("Again."; "The illness. It came out of nowhere."), elevated clinical color ("various cranial meatus", his "delicate mucosa"), and the commentator's hedge "Nausea/vomiting like not an impossibility by any means" — play-by-play on a rhinovirus. Even his errand is pre-scripted, the demand for "yet more" Seldane already wearing performance quotation marks. Then notice what the fever earns: once he can no longer narrate, the prose hands the room over to pure sound — fans, vaporizer, the pock of distant balls — and to the ceiling-blanket's folded terrain, the scene turning landscape at exactly the moment the announcer goes silent.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 60: Onset during suit-up for 0745 B-squad drills; Troeltsch's tic of calling match action into his fist; the viewer sits under Pemulis's "paranoid king" poster (n.21 → note 211: the YES, I'M PARANOID—BUT AM I PARANOID ENOUGH? poster Hal and Schacht gave Pemulis, emblem of his expulsion-dread).
  • p. 60: The medicine-littered bedside table; Seldane glossed in n.22 ("the tactical nuclear weapon of nondrowsy antihistamines"); the Tenuate stash "rather ingeniously" hidden inside the Seldane bottle where "the Peemster would never think to check."
  • p. 60: Rader paranoia — did he "only pretend to pretend" to sneeze; cosmic retributions mentally called down.
  • pp. 60-61: Roommates absent (Schacht in whirlpool for the knee, Pemulis at drills); the breakfast-for-errands deal.
  • p. 61: The sound-carpet — ATHSCME displacement fans "far up north at the wall and border," champagne-cork ball sounds — under the seething vaporizer; the opioid-feverish fugue-state, "literally 'daydreaming,' sick," waking convinced someone unauthorized is in the room; the ceiling-blanket's folds forming "a terrain, like with valleys and shadows."

Themes in this scene

  • The Body and Tennis: the machine breaks down — a top-64 athletic body reduced overnight to clotted Kleenex and bedsprings; illness as the regimen's shadow.
  • Entertainment and the Self: even sick and mute, Troeltsch can't not watch tennis on the viewer; his fist-calling habit shows spectation colonizing identity (he'd rather narrate the game than play it).
  • Addiction and Recovery: low-comedy version — the E.T.A. pharmacological economy of pilfering and "promotion" (Tenuate from Pemulis's stash), everyone medicating something.
  • Dreams: the fever renders sleep's edge as dreaming proper — dreams "ragged at the edges, gnawed on, incomplete," where "you can ask yourself whether you're asleep even as you dream" (p. 61) — the hypnagogic fugue that hands directly into scene 019's full nightmare.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • DuPlessis's fatal congestion (scene 016) / Troeltsch's "thick and doughy" sneeze: deliberate adjacency, mortality refracted into farce — colds as fate.
  • Troeltsch's "circle-stained pillow" (p. 61) rhymes with Orin's nightly sweat-outlines (p. 43, scene 012) — these scenes' two sweating sleepers (catch per Carlisle); and the nested-secrets figure (stolen Tenuate hidden in the Seldane bottle; Rader who maybe "pretended to pretend") is scene 013's secrecy theme in farce key.

Forward

  • Same day as the locker-room scenes 032/034: Troeltsch's "measurable fever in the A.M., deLint said to throttle down today" (p. 103) is this morning.
  • Troeltsch's broadcast ambitions bloom later: his WETA-style match announcing and headset shtick (Eschaton, pp. 321+; Port Washington) and his eventual suspected role in the Tenuate/room-swap weirdness (Hal finds Troeltsch in Axford's room, scene 167, pp. 870-872; follow-up at p. 942).
  • The ATHSCME fans and "wall and border" normalize the Concavity geography expanded in scene 030 (p. 93) and in Marathe/Steeply.
  • "Someone unauthorized in the dorm room with you" + the face-in-floor nightmare immediately following (scene 019) — the book cuts from fugue-state to full nightmare; also seeds the late-book wraith material (the sense of an unauthorized presence at E.T.A. becomes literal with JOI's wraith, pp. 829+).
  • The Tenuate "promotions" run on n.5.a's fuse (scene 013): Pemulis "knows about all too well, and is biding his time to retaliate" — payoff in the Troeltsch/Axford room-swap material (scene 167, pp. 870-872; follow-up at p. 942).

Notable passages (5)
  • p. 60: "It came on ultra-fast and out of the pre-drill blue." — illness as ambush; rhymes with the Entertainment arriving "out of the blue" (p. 89).
  • p. 61: "any dreams you do have seem ragged at the edges, gnawed on, incomplete" — the fugue-state bridge into scene 019.
  • p. 61: the sound-carpet sentence ("Enormous ATHSCME displacement fans...") — E.T.A.'s soundscape includes the continental-waste apparatus; geopolitics as background hum.
  • p. 60: "if Rader might have really sneezed and only pretended to pretend" — the book's irony-regress in eleven words; comic seed of the pretending-to-pretend figure.
  • p. 61: "you can ask yourself whether you're asleep even as you dream" — the fugue-state's epistemology; bridge text for the dream/wake continuum (scenes 019, 023).

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