Scene 067: bus ride home pwta

• p. 281: Results roundup: Wayne and Hal's combined five games lost; A-doubles "resembled a spatterpainting"; the distaff B teams surpass themselves; P.W.T.A. sings; Schacht's three-set loss and conspicuous non-upset get "remarked on by staff"; Schacht-Troeltsch rally in #2 dubs; Troeltsch's disconnected microphone vanishes in the showers "to the rejoicing of all."
• p. 281: The Pemulis default: his opponent lethargic then disoriented in the second set — pointedly, only after Pemulis had lost the first set in a tie-break — delaying play because "the tennis balls were too pretty to hit," conducted gently off by trainers; only Hal and Axford remark that Pemulis isn't strutting; Loach's injection rolls Schacht's eyes up in his head.
• p. 281: At the mixer the defaulted boy eats utensil-free (at one point hands-free), discos without music, and tells the Headmaster's wife he's always wanted to do her from behind — Pemulis whistling innocently at the pre-fab ceiling.
• pp. 281-282: Bus interior: reading-light nozzles, Troeltsch recapping highlights into his fist (left eye "ominously nystagmic"), the C team's Stockhausen pretending to sing opera, SAT guides, the quarter-bus yellow-highlighting Abbott's Flatland, Disciplinary Lit.'s unhappy Oblomov readers, Mario and Coyle's patternless rock-paper-scissors, Tavis murmuring nonstop at Wayne in the back, the Schtittless bus (Schtitt's private mysterious way home and post-win shrillness), liniment and benzoin spicing the warm air: "Everybody was tired in a good way."
• p. 282: deLint one bus back with the 16's, ragging Stice's and Kornspan's asses over a practically given-away doubles; Schacht listing to port, unresponsive to hands waved in front of his face — whereupon Axford and Struck start kibitzing Barry Loach that their knees feel "punk as well," angling for injections of their own.
• p. 282: The leaflet: kingdom-of-prehistoric-England offer re: pulling Freer out of Bernadette Longley; backstory of Thode catching them under the Adidas blanket in September and the sex-segregated bus seating since; Longley's flush; her doubles partner (n.92: Diane Prins, Perth Amboy NJ) marching back to tell Struck and Pemulis "somebody on this bus was so immature it was really sad."
• pp. 282-283: Tavis irrepressible (a Pierre Trudeau impersonation only the driver is old enough to laugh at); the three-bus Mega-breakfast at the Denny's next to Empire Waste at like 0030.

Backward

• Flatland for Flottman/Chawaf/Thorp and Disciplinary Lit.'s Oblomov: the E.T.A. curriculum's dimension-and-stasis reading list, winking at maps-territory and the figurant problem without engaging them.
• The Denny's "over next to Empire Waste" closes this stretch of scenes where it opened geographically — scene 063's E.W.D. installation as hometown landmark.
• Timing note: the squads roll in at ~0030 on 7 Nov — the same calendar day Joelle, across town that afternoon-evening, has Too Much Fun (scene 062); a same-day synchrony worth noticing.
• Direct sequel to scene 065 (the meet itself); Schacht's loss completes the arc of his preference-not-need relation to winning, and the staff's noting of it extends deLint's evaluative machinery.

Forward

• Pemulis dosing an opponent (strongly implied, p. 281) rhymes with the DMZ thread (scene 057 — including his joke there about tossing something in the Gatorade barrels at Port Washington, p. 212, which all but signs this) and prefigures the Eschaton debacle's fallout and his expulsion — his uncharacteristic discretion (noticed only by Hal and Axford) shows he knows the stakes; the dosing's onset exactly when he was losing (first set dropped in a tie-break) marks it as insurance, not whimsy.
• The Axford/Struck knee-kibitzing at Loach (p. 282) is the scene's neatest drug-culture beat — recreational demand instantly organizing around legitimate medicine (Carlisle's one commentary point here); Loach's own improbable-grace backstory arrives near the book's end (pp. 967, scene 183 ff.).
• Troeltsch's nystagmic eye and fist-microphone continue his 'drines-and-broadcasting pathology (scene 065, p. 268; later the Troeltsch/Stice room-swap oddities).
• Tavis beaming at John Wayne in the back seat extends C.T.'s cultivation of the prize recruit (and the Tavis-Wayne-Avril triangle's weirdness to come, p. 552, scene 108 ff.).

• p. 281: "bearing their shields rather than upon them, as they say" — the Spartan tag deadpanned into jr.-tennis idiom.
• p. 281: "the tennis balls were too pretty to hit" — the funniest drug-onset clause in the book; Pemulis's signature left unsigned.
• p. 282: Mario and Coyle's rock-paper-scissors "engrossed in trying to locate patterns in each other's rhythms of choices of shapes, which they both decided there weren't any" — Mario-grade contentment in randomness.
• p. 282: "Everybody was tired in a good way." — the team-as-organism's vital sign; five flat words doing the whole scene's emotional work.
• pp. 282-283: the Mega-breakfast close — rare unshadowed communal happiness; ends this stretch's E.T.A. thread on warmth.