IJ study archive

Scene 122: eta supper stice hal

Scene
122
Pages
627–638
When
Wed 11 Nov YDAU (2009), 1810h+ — same evening, hours before scene 120's shooting downhill
Where
E.T.A. dining hall, first floor of West Housein: E.T.A. (Enfield Tennis Academy) › E.T.A. dining hall (West House)
POV
3rd person, roving among the best table; Hal-inflected

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Open questions this scene bears on

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 12)

Summary

Supper in the E.T.A. dining hall, hours after Ortho Stice took Hal to 7-5 in the third in an exhibition Schtitt ordered for reasons nobody can pin down; awe ripples table to table. Around the best table's deadly-serious eating, Stice regales with his parents' cigarette-between-forearms love epic, and Troeltsch's powdered-milk conspiracy rant tips into what everyone is studiously not discussing: the accelerating, sinister displacement of objects all over the Academy — squeegees hung in a saltire with no means of attachment, a ball machine in the Females' Sauna, a lawnmower in the dawn kitchen, Stice's moving bed. Hal, secretly twenty-nine days from handing his urine to authority figures and newly, miserably substance-free, builds fortifications out of food he doesn't eat and knows he should have lost. Stice, half-convinced the afternoon's wind-defying ball-swerves answered his inner will, tries to move a cherry tomato by concentration alone. Little Ingersoll returns from the Eschaton debacle on crutches and Hal kneels penitent by his chair; the narrator deflates Troeltsch en passant — E.T.A. skim has been powdered for four years, re-bagged for placebo effect.

What to notice

The scene runs a controlled experiment in community epistemology: Troeltsch's milk conspiracy gets full forensic table-time and general mockery — and a deadpan narratorial aside later proves him accidentally right about the powder, if wrong about the plot — while the genuinely inexplicable evidence, squeegees crossed high on a wall with "no visible means of attachment", is "studiously not talked about". The hall debunks the trivial truth and won't touch the terrifying one, and Troeltsch even names the mechanism whose real application he can't see: "We look the other way with our heads in the sand." Watch the two sealed interiors sharing the best table: Hal flooding with spit over a countdown only two friends know about, Stice with "a secret suspicion about a secret that has more to do with the actual table than with the people at the table" — parallel privacies the table's rankings-calculus misreads as mere competitive nerves. Hal's plate literalizes his condition: "an intricate fortification-structure" with "turrets and archer-slits", built and not eaten — defenses up, appetite gone — and it's Struck who ends the scene eating the fortifications. And clock the tray-window sign, "YR MOTHER DOES NOT LIVE HERE; BUS YR TRAY": false for exactly one family in the room, whose mother not only lives here but has already blue-inked a semicolon into the milk dispenser's signage.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 627: 1810h, 133 kids, 13 staff; hall overture (YR MOTHER DOES NOT LIVE HERE; BUS YR TRAY); best-table protocol; the Syrian Satelliter and peasant-skirted Moment soft-profiler at the prorectors' table; news of Stice's near-win makes its "figure-eight way" around — R.H.I.P.
  • pp. 627-628: serious refueling; Stice bites his sandwich "like it's the wrist of an assailant"; Axford's lesion makes all food taste the way vomit smells; Kahn and Kornspan exiled for P.O.W.ish gusto; Hal dismantles the stelliform mashed potatoes.
  • pp. 628-629: the Stice saga — parents met in a Partridge KS C/W bar laying a lit cigarette between pressed forearms; still burn-scarred; divorced and remarried four or five times; The Bride's hurled multicourse meals, The Brood on econobag chips; Ortho "loves his folks to distraction" and memorizes their battles for the table.
  • pp. 629-631: Troeltsch's powdered-milk case ("Image management. Sensory management... part of some larger overall kertwang," maybe Eschaton punishment); Schacht's Regrouting-Committee rebuttal; the dispenser's mammarial bags; the MILK IS FILLING sign's comma "semicolonized... by a fairly obvious person" (n.260: Avril grades in blue ink); Wayne and Freer's free buttinskis; Struck spears Hal's tomato unrebuked.
  • pp. 631-633: the litany tips into the real anomaly — dinette sets in tunnels, the lawnmower that gave Mrs. Clarke the fantods, the ball machine in the Females' Sauna, squeegees (n.259) hung crossed "in a kind of saltire" on a wall Schacht and Shaw found without nails or holes; "Who says my bed moves?"; the objects "tektitic and sinister," with "none of the cheery odor of regular pranksterism" — studiously untalked-about.
  • pp. 633-634: anxious "sound-carpet" with The Darkness at its vague center; dusk panorama east; Clenette (backpack bulging with tolerated dumpster-pilferage, n.261) and Didi holding hands down the unauthorized path to the halfway house.
  • p. 634: Hal recalls Orin's late-in-college covert-double-date experiment — this after the girl Orin loved and Himself "compulsively used in films" was disfigured — and Orin's record of Subjects, "a cross between a chart and a journal," left out "just pleading to be read"; Makulic's silky tan cataract; the table's sexual census — Hal "maybe the one male E.T.A. for whom lifetime virginity is a conscious goal."
  • pp. 634-635: Hal's mouth floods with spit; he should have lost — Stice choked from disbelief, but at "a different Hal... It's now a whole new Hal, a Hal who does not get high, or hide," 29 days from the cup "with a wide smile and exemplary posture"; only Pemulis and Axford know.
  • pp. 635-636: lull as Ingersoll enters on crutches, cast sailor-hat-white, Nwangi stony (Penn still at St. E.'s); Axford, his Big Buddy, sits eyes shut; Hal and Troeltsch go over; the asexual contingent meditated on; Freer's nascent-lesbian theory of serious female athletes (W.T.A., n.262).
  • pp. 636-637: Stice vs. the cherry tomato on his bowl's incline — "trying to respect this object with all his might," flexing "some kind of psychic muscle he's not sure he even has"; the afternoon's anomalous swerves (a mishit volley curving "like a drenched spitter" into the corner against wind and vector); Hal's wide-eyed, unfocused, on-the-verge look; yesterday's urology-van panic, Pemulis and his lab-ready Visine bottles nowhere found.
  • p. 637: insiders can't square Hal's misery with urine trouble — the administration's relative wasn't getting booted; the deadpan reveal: E.T.A. skim has been powdered since Tavis took the helm, strained and re-bagged "for a kind of placebo effect; it's mostly just the concept of powdered milk that gags people."
  • pp. 637-638: Struck swaps plates for Hal's untouched fortification; Hal kneels by Ingersoll, listening across blindfolded Arslanian to Nwangi; Freer blandly probes Stice about Hal "feeling sort of punk"; the Phoneless Cord fortune; Stice's Rusk-authorized exemption — no fear of heights, but of weights.

Themes in this scene

  • Ghosts and Wraiths: the object-displacements are JOI's wraith at work, unnamed and dreadful ("tektitic and sinister"); Stice misreads the wraith's match-time ball-bending as his own nascent psychic muscle.
  • The Body and Tennis: eating as solemn refueling under carb/gluten dogma; rivals' CPUs running Decision Trees on each other's "psychic competitive fault-line[s]"; Stice's gift-body — Polycleitos torso, ravaged-Churchill face.
  • Addiction and Recovery: the white-knuckling "whole new Hal, a Hal who does not get high, or hide," counting 29 days — sobriety experienced as misery and excess saliva, illegible to everyone around him.
  • Communication and Solipsism: Hal silent behind his food fortifications amid the hall's roar; a community's pact of studiously not talking about what frightens it.
  • Family and Hamlet: Stice's loved-to-distraction, serially remarried folks as the anti-Incandenza control case; Orin's chart pleading to be read; Avril's blue-dot semicolon correcting even kitchen signage; Hal literally kneeling penitent.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • Ingersoll's tendon and Penn's femur are the I-Day Eschaton's butcher's bill (pp. 321-342); Axford as Ingersoll's B.B. of record (cf. scene 036).
  • Clenette's descent feeds directly into scene 120, same evening: she's back inside Ennet by 2315; Hal "had read fear in" her leaving C.T.'s office with his litter (scene 102, p. 510).
  • The Moment profiler is Steeply embedded; cf. scene 121 (Tine's war-council) and the redacted interview transcripts — see scenes/scene n234.
  • Endnotes, briefly: n.259 squeegees = canted-rubber court-dryers (E.T.A. eschews the mildewing EZ-DRI roller); n.260 Avril's blue ink fingers the Militant Grammarian as semicolonizer; n.261 staff mining E.T.A.'s waste is tolerated, requiring only "visual discretion"; n.262 W.T.A. = the distaff A.T.P.

Forward

  • The displacements continue scene 037 (the Husky VI tripod, p. 121, named at p. 632) and scene 084 (Stice's bed, pp. 394-395); cause revealed in Gately's hospital wraith-colloquies (pp. 829ff); culminates in Stice's frozen-forehead window and the Hal-Stice talk (pp. 862-876).
  • The exhibition and Stice's belief-crisis set up the projected Hal-Stice rematch the book points toward but never plays (pp. 964ff, scene 183); "Neither Wayne nor Hal's been approachable all fall" (p. 633).
  • Urine thread: the rumored Tavis/O.N.A.N.T.A. showdown follows scene 102's waiting-room vigil (pp. 508-527); resolution deferred to the narrative notes — see scenes/scene n321, scene n324, scene n332.
  • The disfigurement of "the girl Orin had been wildly in love with" (p. 634) corroborates the Joelle-disfigurement account later complicated by Notkin's version (pp. 788-795, scene 159) and U.H.I.D. doctrine.

Notable passages (6)
  • p. 628: Stice "bites into his sandwich like it's the wrist of an assailant" — appetite as violence.
  • p. 632: "The inappropriate found objects have had a tektitic and sinister aspect: none of the cheery odor of regular pranksterism; they're not funny." — thesis line of the wraith phenomena.
  • pp. 634-635: "It's now a whole new Hal, a Hal who does not get high, or hide..." — Hal's sober self-audit; pivot of his late-book decline.
  • p. 636: "a Polycleitos body... on whose graceful neck sits the face of a ravaged Winston Churchill" — the gift-body theme distilled.
  • pp. 636-637: the cherry-tomato willing and the "drenched spitter" volley — wraith-favor misread as will; anchor passage for ghosts-wraiths.
  • p. 637: "it's mostly just the concept of powdered milk that gags people." — concept vs. substance; the scene's epistemological punchline.

What links here Timeline events here (50) · Connected from (3) · Passages quoted here (35) · Motifs (4)

Timeline events here

Connected from

Passages quoted here

Motifs