IJ study archive

Scene 094: dawn drills second world

Scene
94
Pages
450–461
When
9 Nov YDAU (2009) — text header '9 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT' (p. 450); dawn, the morning after the I.-Day Eschaton debacle and gala
Where
E.T.A., Enfield MA — Headmaster's House living-room window (Tavis), then the outdoor East/Center/Show Courts, A.M. drills (the Lung not yet inflated)in: E.T.A. (Enfield Tennis Academy) › Headmaster's House (HmH) · E.T.A. (Enfield Tennis Academy) › E.T.A. courts & Eschaton grounds (also)
POV
3rd person omniscient/free-indirect, panning from Charles Tavis at his window to the drilling A-squad (Hal-centered) to Schtitt's address (catalog: */C.T./Hal)

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Open questions this scene bears on

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 14)

Summary

Dawn, 9 Nov YDAU, the morning after I.-Day: Charles Tavis stands at the Headmaster's House window with his decaf, watching the A-squad assemble for drills and practicing his administrative creed of reverse-Buddhist "Total Worry," while the thing he may or may not have fathered sleeps by the stereo behind him. The scene then descends to the courts for the full anatomy of E.T.A. dawn drills — sprints, the eight-court rotation, Star Drills, van der Meer Side-to-Sides — with Hal chilled, tooth aching, ankle braced, drilling alongside Stice, Wayne, and Coyle under prorectors' eyes, the Eschaton debacle legible in J. J. Penn's absence, Possalthwaite's bandaged nose, and the glitter of broken monitor-glass still in the fence-line snow. Drills end with Schtitt's bullhorn-and-pointer sermon: complaints about cold are met with his doctrine that the player must build a "second world inside the lines" — a sheltered 23.8-by-8.2-meter world without conditions, where the point is to "occur" — backed by the half-threat that residence on the court can be arranged, as it was in his own Kaiserslautern boyhood. Hal, asked where one applies for citizenship in this second world, answers "Head, sir… The game's two heads' one world," and Schtitt laughs and releases them to play.

What to notice

Listen to the hillside: "Tiny cries and a repetitive scream for help come up from someplace downhill to the east, presumably Enfield Marine" — the novel's other spine is audible from the courts as pure ambience, a scream filed between birdsong and smokestack plumes and never mentioned again; the halfway-house world is close enough to hear and institutionally inaudible. Tavis's vigil runs as one enormous sentence of administrative worry, and inside it Mario is only ever "the thing" with claws on its chest — the book's warmest character stripped of a human pronoun by the man who may have fathered him, dread doing its work at the level of grammar. The drill anatomy sees dawn through a medicine cabinet and a kitchen drawer: sky "the color of Kaopectate", river "a strip of foil's dull side", cold balls coming off the strings "with a dead sound like chung". And watch what Hal does during the sermon on citizenship: he "very subtly shoots in a small plug of Kodiak" mid-homily — already a naturalized citizen of a different bounded interior where there are no conditions. Schtitt's sheltering second world and the Substance's are the same architecture, which is why the sermon's warmest promise and its quiet threat ("No one is a prisoner here", delivered right after the Kaiserslautern months of never crossing a line) are so hard to tell apart.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 450: date header; E.T.A.'s enrollment arithmetic — 136 students, 72 female, the gender-quota and housing headaches that Tavis & Co. triage.
  • p. 451: Tavis at the Headmaster's House window before dawn, lips moving soundlessly, hazelnut decaf steaming; asleep behind him "the thing it's not entirely impossible he may have fathered" — Mario, on his air mattress by the Tatsuoka, with his bradypnea-breathing that sounds like "sky" or "ski"; Tavis dreads its "terrible calm and accepting knowledge."
  • pp. 451-452: the key to running a top junior academy is "a kind of reverse-Buddhism, a state of Total Worry" — what James Incandenza could not have cared about less.
  • p. 452: the A-squad's reward is dawn drills alfresco (the Lung not yet up); Hal in his father's rolled-sleeve alpaca jacket, chilled, squelching, wincing as cold air hits the bad tooth; hill sprints with half-hearted warrior-noises; ritual retching ("the drills' reveille"), this morning multiple from the gala's sweets.
  • pp. 452-453: staging — 24 girls on Center, 32 boys (minus, ominously, J. J. Penn) on East; Schtitt in his crow's-nest atop the Tower with bullhorn, pipe, and weatherman's pointer; Mario's terrifying filming perch on the nest's railing.
  • pp. 453-455: the eight-court drill rotation in full: taped-square groundstrokes (Thorp, Watson), 'Butterflies' (Hal and Wayne's illicit 'atom-smashing'), Tap & Whack overheads (Schtitt needles 'Mr. revenant Hal Incandenza' about babying the ankle), serves (Hartigan), returns, Gatorade in conic cups, Hal supreme at microtennis on the Finesse court, wind sprints.
  • pp. 455-456: Eschaton's wreckage in the landscape — glitter of broken monitor-glass and floppy-disk shards in the frozen melt; Penn absent with leg-rumors, Possalthwaite's two black eyes and loosening nose-bandages, Lord back from the E.R. with the monitor still over his head awaiting flown-in expertise (per Axford).
  • pp. 456-457: Star Drills against Schtitt's stopwatch (Hal 41/38/48; Wayne's 33; Stice's disallowed 29); pro-forma use of the distress bucket; hirsute Petropolis Kahn ('Woolly Mammoth') pitches forward and lies still; Nwangi tells people to walk around him.
  • p. 457: Side-to-Sides — van der Meer's "demonic in its simplicity" fungo drill; Dunkel goes easy on Hal's ankle (top-4 seed at the WhataBurger, "woe to the prorector who lets Hal get hurt the way Hal let some of his Little Buddies get hurt yesterday"); Dunkel has evident instructions to put the hurt on Stice, who ends "mewing for his aunts."
  • pp. 458-459: Schtitt's address begins — "Am seeing sluggish drilling, by sluggards"; the catechism with Chu; the litany of "is always something that is too": cold, heat, crabgrass, hecklers, injuries, "a too pretty girl in audience" — every excuse for withholding the total self.
  • pp. 459-460: the sermon's core — not "adjusting" but building the "second world inside the lines," 23.8 × 8.2 meters, sheltered from cold and wind, where "you have a chance to occur"; "here there are no conditions"; the menace-quiet threat that it "can be arranged" not to leave the court, as in Schtitt's Kaiserslautern boyhood months of living inside the lines; deLint's translation: "So put a lid on it about the fucking cold."
  • pp. 460-461: roll-call of would-be escapees (Sweeny, Coyle, little Peter Beak); Hal subtly loads a plug of Kodiak and muses that deLint may lack a true z coordinate; Schtitt's closing — "Hit… Move. Travel lightly. Occur. Be here. Not in bed or shower or over baconschteam, in the mind. Be here in total"; asked where citizenship in the second world is applied for, Hal: "The human head, sir… The game's two heads' one world. One world, sir." Schtitt laughs: "Play."

Themes in this scene

  • The Body and Tennis: the fullest single procedural account of the E.T.A. regimen — the body drilled court by court into an instrument ("You are not arms. Arm in the real tennis is like wheels of vehicles. Not engine."), with Schtitt's transcendence-through-discipline philosophy delivered over the retch-buckets that are its price.
  • Family and Hamlet: Tavis's dawn vigil over "the thing it's not entirely impossible he may have fathered" quietly reopens the Mario-paternity question at the Incandenza family's heart; Hal drills inside his dead father's alpaca jacket, at the academy Himself built and Tavis now worries over.
  • Maps and Territory: Schtitt's "second world inside the lines" is a bounded, self-made territory measured to the decimeter (23.8 × 8.2 m) where "there are no conditions" — the constructive inverse of Eschaton's map-collapse the day before, whose literal debris still glitters along the fences.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • Schtitt's jab at Chu "since you begin with the clipping pictures of great professional figures" (p. 459) calls back to Chu's fame-hunger confession to Lyle (pp. 387-390, scene 082).

Forward

  • Scene 093 immediately before (Hal's recurring teeth-loss dream; Mario's agitation over Madame Psychosis's WYYY sabbatical, n.180) threads directly into this one: Hal's nightmare tooth becomes the real "bad tooth" that twinges all through drills (pp. 452, 453, 458), and Madame Psychosis's absence (= Joelle's overdose and entry into Ennet House, scenes 068/097) is what has Mario sleeping at HmH — where Tavis watches him here (p. 451).
  • Direct aftermath of the I.-Day Eschaton debacle (scene 073, pp. 321-342): Penn's absence and leg-rumors, Possalthwaite's nose, Lord's monitor-head, the monitor-glass glitter (pp. 455-456); "the way Hal let some of his Little Buddies get hurt yesterday" (p. 457) names Hal's culpable spectation, which feeds the urinalysis crisis when the ONANTA tester comes (pp. 1063ff, n.324/325 orbit).
  • Schtitt's sermon extends his Mario dialogue on tennis as bounded infinity (pp. 79-84, scene 026-orbit) and his "second world" rhetoric anticipates the Schtitt/staff theory of the game as escape from the self heard again around pp. 660ff (deLint-Steeply) — and ironizes against Hal's eventual inability to "occur" at all (scene 001, Year of Glad).
  • Schtitt twice calls Hal "revenant" (pp. 454, 461) — a needle about the ankle and comeback, but lexically a ghost-word that lands differently after the wraith reveals figurants and revenants (pp. 829, scene 162ff); Hal by YG is precisely a revenant of himself.
  • Tavis's "Total Worry" administration contrasts with the founder's indifference and sets up Tavis's logorrheic anxiety in person (e.g., pp. 514ff with the Moment soft-profiler); the Mario-paternity hedge connects to Mario's conception mystery (scene 071, pp. 312-317) and Orin's poisonous speculations in the Bain correspondence (n.269).
  • The WhataBurger Jr. Invitational (pp. 453, 457) is the never-reached terminus of the book's E.T.A. plot — the Tucson event toward which Hal, the DMZ, and (per the wraith-orbit hints) the A.F.R. all converge after the book's last scene; Coyle's Tucson homecoming framing is also the desert where Marathe and Steeply sit in the intercut serial (scenes 096/098).
  • Hal's Kodiak plug and tobacco/marijuana-compromised circulation (pp. 452, 460) thread into his secret-Substance arc and the Bob Hope withdrawal to come (pp. 851ff, scene 165).

Notable passages (6)
  • p. 451: "his lips moving slightly and without sound… the thing it's not entirely impossible he may have fathered asleep up next to the sound system" — Tavis's window vigil; the paternity hedge embedded in a single enormous sentence of administrative dread.
  • pp. 451-452: "the key to the successful administration of a top-level junior tennis academy lies in cultivating a kind of reverse-Buddhism, a state of Total Worry" — Tavis's creed, foil to both JOI and Lyle.
  • p. 454: "Mr. revenant Hal Incandenza was letting the ball get the little much behind him" — Schtitt's ghost-word for Hal, first instance.
  • pp. 458-459: "Is always something that is too. Cold. Hot. Wet and dry… A too pretty girl in audience, watching. Who could play like this?" — the excuses litany; the-body-tennis in list form.
  • pp. 459-460: "Make this second world inside the world: here there are no conditions." — the sermon's thesis sentence.
  • p. 461: "Hit… Move. Travel lightly. Occur. Be here. Not in bed or shower or over baconschteam, in the mind. Be here in total." — Schtitt's imperatives; and Hal's reply "The game's two heads' one world. One world, sir."

What links here Timeline events here (36) · Connected from (6) · Passages quoted here (39) · Motifs (6)

Timeline events here

Connected from

Passages quoted here

Motifs