Scene 036: big buddy sessions

• p. 109: The 3 NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U. header; Hal tells Blott the end-of-day hatred "is just part of the work." (The Marathe/Steeply tail line that once sat at the head of this section belongs with scene 035 and is covered there.)
• p. 109-110: V.R.6 described — windowless, heated floor, wall-hung high-def viewer; the five boys splayed on throw-pillows.
• pp. 110-111: The Stan Smith visualization cartridge in loving detail: desiccated form, "no wasted motion, egoless strokes"; E.T.A. kids conditioned to read the ball's rotating seams; Hal's fingers sticky with tincture of benzoin (n.46, p. 111: callus-corticatization stuff, more universal among serious players than Lemon Pledge).
• p. 111: "Don't Think Just See Don't Know Just Flow"; you're supposed to disappear into the loop. Blott's dread of seven more years of suffering; Ingersoll on the Show; Hal: only one top junior in twenty even gets there.
• p. 111: Texture of the quintet: Blott's "Mr.-Bouncety-Bounce-Program"-brand bow-biters ("extraordinarily artless and young"); Peter Beak asleep with his eyes open — "a queer talent E.T.A. seems to instill in the younger ones"; Orin could do it at the dinner table too; the money asides (Blott's tumor-flying E.N.T.-oncologist father and trust fund; Ingersoll's parents' TP-grocery service).
• p. 112: The food chain recited — Wayne over Hal over Struck/Shaw over Troeltsch over Freer over Schacht ("showing incredible balls just hanging on"); "The system's got inequality as an axiom"; Ingersoll: "I know just where I stand at all times."
• p. 112: Hal's thesis: "We're each deeply alone here. It's what we all have in common, this aloneness." Ingersoll's reply: "E Unibus Pluram."
• p. 113: The turn: the instant group-cohesion around bitching is the staff's gift — "The suffering unites us… Nothing brings you together like a common enemy"; the staff get sadistic on schedule before big competitive weeks.
• p. 114: Hal's Lyle-diagnosed repulsion at Ingersoll (he sees in the kid parts of himself he can't accept — "None of this ever occurs to Hal when Ingersoll's in the room. He wishes him ill.").
• p. 114-115: Hal's secret-high physiology: spit-flood by dinnertime, the Kodiak-as-excuse, getting off on the secrecy more than the high, the feeling of a clue "on the tip of his tongue" in some mute inaccessible cortex; feral late dinners with C.T. and the Moms.
• p. 115: V.R.5 — Wayne (through Chu's cards): mastery is plateaus; "Plateaux. With an X."
• p. 115-116: The three doomed types — Despairing (bails), Obsessive (wills himself into injury), and worst, Complacent (designs a whole game around his plateau, smiles tighter and tighter — then the quiet knock from deLint).
• p. 116-117: V.R.2 — Pemulis stages a transparently rigged two-card hustle on Possalthwaite, Lord et al.; the kids already speak croupier ("The ante." "Or it's called the pot.").
• p. 117: V.R.3 — Schacht and the giant plasticene oral demonstrator, flossing "down below the ostensible gumline."
• p. 117-118: Troeltsch (sick in bed, vaporizer chugging): repetition first last always; strokes sink into "the C.P.S. The machine-language… The court might as well be inside you. The ball stops being a ball"; thirteen-to-fifteen as the plateau where "the concentration and character shit starts."
• p. 118-119: V.R.8 — Struck on kertwanging opponents: "You play the calls, not a word, keep smiling… you'll have grown inside as a person" — and if you lose, sabotage his water-jug.
• p. 119-120: Carl Whale's urgent sub-14 question (the fart that might not be a fart); Struck: "I let it ride… Thank You Sir may I have another."
• p. 120: Stice in the foyer channeling Schtitt: sacrifice, discipline, "how to be a good American during a time, boys, when America isn't good its own self"; "I'd chew fiberglass for that old man."
• p. 120-121: Closing splice of Schacht's floss-string and Pemulis's "Double or Nothing" pitch.
• p. 121: The coda: Beak surfaces from his nap — "So they do it on purpose? Try to make us hate them?"; Blott gives Beak Hal's aperçu; communal-dinner staging (Mrs. Clarke sometimes lets Mario ring the triangle; hairnets, Ob/Gynish gloves); Hal weighing a tunnel run, "maybe not even all the way down into the Pump Room," only twenty minutes late; "Limits and rituals" — "is there a clear line, a quantifiable difference between need and just strong desire"; he sits up to spit; "There is a twinge in a tooth on his mouth's left side."

Backward

• The Marathe/Steeply tail line printed just before this section (Steeply tamping a cigarette, Marathe humming) belongs with scene 035 and is digested there — the whole desert serial runs one night, 30 Apr–1 May YDAU.
• Hal's "This is their gift to us" (p. 113) lands eight pages after Steeply's "the gift which was not a gift" (p. 105, scene 035) — the engineered common enemy as the benign administrative cousin of the Trojan samizdat.
• Continuity wrinkles, as printed: (a) Ingersoll says the Tucson WhataBurger comes "the week after" I.D. Day (p. 113; Hal's next line rebuts him on a different point) — its actual placement is Thanksgiving weekend, almost three weeks after (Carlisle catch); (b) Possalthwaite sits in Pemulis's V.R.2 group (p. 117) — the pairing the corpus keeps: n.324 makes Pemulis "Postal Weight's Big Buddy" outright and n.332 has him "doing a little B.B.-intervention on Possalthwaite"; the odd datum is p. 98's "technically... Possalthwaite Hal's," itself flagged as a technicality on an off-the-books trade; (c) Troeltsch's room here is "his, Pemulis and Schacht's room in Subdorm C" (p. 117) vs. his Subdormitory B room at p. 60 (scene 018) — both authorial.
• Troeltsch holding court sick in bed continues scene 018 (3 Nov rhinovirus).
• Beak's eyes rolling up mid-dream (p. 111) is an image the Entertainment's viewers will literalize — the eyes-open sleeper in front of a hypnotic loop is a proto-tableau of the attaché's living room (scenes 025/028; Carlisle's catch).

Forward

• Ingersoll's "E Unibus Pluram" (p. 112) is Wallace's own essay title — the irony-sincerity program made an E.T.A. joke; pairs with Hal's hero-of-nonaction essay (scene 044).
• Wayne's plateaux taxonomy extends Chu's plateau anxiety and prefigures Chu's fame-hunger consult with Lyle (pp. 387-389); "plateaux. With an X." is also Troeltsch's repetition speech's destination and Hal's own "leap of exponents" (scene 048, p. 155).
• Hal's secrecy-attachment (p. 114) continues scene 013 (Pump Room) and sets the terms for his Nov YDAU withdrawal collapse; the "mute and inaccessible part of the cortex" rhymes with "I am in here" (scene 001).
• Lyle's diagnosis of the Ingersoll-repulsion (p. 114) shows Lyle as confessor before his formal introduction in scene 039.
• The tooth-twinge / limits-and-rituals coda (p. 121 beat) belongs to this scene. The need-vs-desire question is this scene's real punchline, and the tooth-twinge opens Hal's dental thread (the rotten-tooth/Kodiak anxiety that recurs through his withdrawal arc).
• Blott's "'Mr.-Bouncety-Bounce-Program'-brand" bow-biters (p. 111) join the kiddy-show thread — first named at scene 007, p. 35 (the attaché's afternoon rerun); "Mr. Bouncety-Bounce Show" proper appears once, in the ad-meeting transcript of scene 168 (p. 878); Gately's beloved kiddy-show host at p. 922.
• Stice's "I'd chew fiberglass" devotion to Schtitt feeds his transcendence arc (the Stice-Hal match and bed phenomena); Possalthwaite under Pemulis's card-hustle tutelage foreshadows Eschaton (scene 048 n.53; pp. 321-342) and Pemulis's later mentorship betrayals.

• p. 110: "A graying and somewhat ravaged-looking Stan Smith…" — the loop description; spectation-as-self-erasure done as sports pedagogy (Entertainment logic in miniature).
• p. 112: "We're each deeply alone here. It's what we all have in common, this aloneness." — thesis line for the whole novel's E.T.A. half.
• p. 113: "Nothing brings you together like a common enemy." — the administrative theory of community.
• p. 114: "why he gets off on the secrecy of getting high in secret more than on the getting high itself" — Hal's addiction phenomenology in one clause.
• p. 117-118: "The point of repetition is there is no point… The court might as well be inside you." — Troeltsch's machine-language aria; the long paragraph is the unit.
• p. 120: "I'd chew fiberglass for that old man." — Stice's filial creed.
• p. 121: "Like as in is there a clear line, a quantifiable difference between need and just strong desire." — Hal's limits-and-rituals coda; the addiction question stated in his own idiom hours before dinner; pairs with Marathe's choice-vs-compulsion challenge (scene 035) and Erdedy/Gompert as the worked cases.