Scene 127: delint steeply seeing

• pp. 655-656: "Sometimes it's hard to believe the sun's the same sun over all different parts of the planet" — NNE sun "the color of hollandaise"; between points both boys clamp left hands under arms; Stice double-faulting (one per 1.3 games, a./d.f. .6 — n.267) but wise to crank it; Steeply: Stice serves like a man who "learned to serve by studying still photos of the motion's different stages"; the serve's "solid pock... handcuffing Hal at such speeds the ball's movement presented only as afterimage."
• pp. 656-657: Hal up 5-4 having saved three ads; deLint: against Hal "a kid's only real chance is to totally press... Nobody stays back and out-controls Incandenza anymore"; Steeply's non-sequitur probe, "Does Herr Schtitt wear eye makeup?"
• p. 657: pretending to flip a page, Steeply drops her pen into the bleacher struts — the clatter making Stice take extra bounces; the ace "literally too close to call"; Hal deliberates and flat-hands the call good — game Stice; "We can go on and play two." / "Not your job to see it... You hit it too hard to see, you deserve the point"; Stice slices two gimme balls down to Hal's baseline; the Easter Bowl gum-Heimlich anecdote; deLint translates take-two etiquette ("Play a let, babe").
• pp. 657-658: "They seem like friends even playing"; deLint's laugh rendered as "the mucoidal fist-at-chest laugh of a lap-blanketed old man in a lawn chair on his gravel backyard in Scottsdale AZ, hearing his son say his wife claimed no longer to know who he was" — a simile reaching far outside the scene; the Vaught twins shush him.
• p. 658: one-sentence cut: "Several little boys were strung busily out along the sides of a small utility tunnel twenty-six meters below the Show Courts" (= scene 129).
• p. 658: Steeply hunts images for Hal's serve — violinist with bow, child making snow angels, man at a precipice "falling forward, giving in sweetly to his own weight," a hammering man — "But all these were only parts"; Hal's face "pale and thoroughly unchildlike, his gaze somehow extending only half a meter in front of him. He looked nothing like the punter"; Steeply's own two games of tennis, with his wife; "It was unlikely that any one game figured much in the Entertainment."
• pp. 658-659: anatomy of Hal's serve-built point — depth and egg-shaped topspin instead of pace, the looper to the same corner, the textbook cross-court into "green lined space" carrying away from the lunging Stice (n.268: Steeply noticing left-handers everywhere — Hal, Stice, a Girls' 14, deLint charting left-handed; Marathe and "Québecer triple-operative Luria P———" both southpaws, "though... this could hardly be called significant"); deLint's legendary peripheral vision catches her writing only the Gregg ideogram for pretty.
• p. 659: "Hal's in essence a torturer... instead of a straight-out killer like Stice or the Canadian Wayne"; the ball kept "seeming just in reach, to keep you trying"; angles set up from the serve; "It makes you think of chess." / " 'Chess on the run.' " / "Nice term."
• pp. 659-660: access stonewall — "My guess is you don't" get to sit down with Hal; no kid has ever been interviewed; how to work Tavis ("back into a Yes-No corner... It takes about twenty minutes if you're sharp"); Moment "a national magazine for and about exceptional people."
• pp. 660-661: deLint's creed: "this place is about seeing instead of being seen"; talent fucks with a junior's head — they pay "to go back to being little fish... To forget themselves as objects of attention for a few years and see what they can do when the eyes are off them"; "They didn't come here to get read about... Babe."
• p. 661: her counter ("Were you ever written about, as a player?") deflected — deLint never had the ranking; Orin "essentially a one-trick pony... kind of a head-case"; the real prospects: Hal, Stice, Wayne for sure, the Vaughts, Kent.
• pp. 661-662: "But even you call it 'The Show.' They'll be entertainers." / "You bet your ass they will be"; deLint puts the clipboard down: inculcate that "it's never about being seen" and the Show can't enslave them to the statue — they won't "blow their brains out after winning an event... or dive out a third-story window when... their blossom starts to fade"; "you chew them up, it's what you do."
• pp. ~661-662: "We chew statues?"; the machine speech — "It's the machine they're all dying to throw themselves into. They don't know the machine. But we do. Gerhardt's teaching them to see the ball out of a place inside that can't be chewed... Profile Schtitt, if you want to profile somebody"; her sardonic "this inside chew-proof place. It's a secret place."
• p. ~662: Hal mishits a second serve off the frame; Stice breaks him to 6-5; bleacher murmurs "like a courtroom at an unpleasant revelation"; a couple nastier kids applaud the mishit.
• p. ~662: deLint's parting shots — if it were his command she'd be pressing her nose between the gate's bars; why Orin anyway? "A one-trick pony. Why not John Wayne? ... Aimed like a fucking missile at the Show... Wayne's your ideal food-group. Which is why we'll keep you off him"; she surveys the scalps, gear bags, "a couple incongruous cans of furniture polish"; final line: "Carved out of what, though, this place?"

Backward

• deLint's seeing/being-seen sermon is Schtitt's philosophy (scenes 026, 094) operationalized; the statue/suicide warnings recall Clipperton (scenes 086, 089), the kid who got the being-seen economy exactly wrong and died of arrival.
• Steeply's wife (tennis "a couple times, with his wife," p. 658) corroborates the removed wedding band of scene 123 (p. 638) and the C.V. of scene 061.

Forward

• Continuous with scene 125 (same set; staging and players) and scene 130 (Steeply stays through set two, working Poutrincourt in deLint's place); scene 126's montage is intercut "at just this moment," and the one-line tunnel cut (p. 658) plants scene 129, whose opening sentence ("Carved out of sedimentary shale...") directly answers this scene's closing question across the interposed letters of scene 128 — a deliberate splice-echo.
• "It was unlikely that any one game figured much in the Entertainment" (p. 658): Steeply's actual mission surfacing mid-simile — ties to the samizdat-content speculation of the mountainside serial (scenes 098, 123) and Molly Notkin's account to come (pp. 788-795).
• Hal's "gaze somehow extending only half a meter in front of him" and the inspired-vs.-book question deepen the deLint/Poutrincourt diagnosis of Hal's decaying interiority in scene 130 and Hal's own late-book vacancy.
• n.268's southpaw census — including "A.F.R. turncoat Rémy Marathe and Québecer triple-operative Luria P———" — is one of the narrator's clearest confirmations of Marathe's quadruple-agent status and of Luria P.'s operative rank; cf. scenes 031/072 (Marathe's betrayal calculus) and Orin's capture (pp. 971-972).
• The "incongruous cans of furniture polish" in the stands (p. ~662) wink at the occult-objects thread (scene 129's lobby balls and AminoPal pyramid; the exfoliated-Pledge husks in the tunnels, p. 669) — wraith residue at the edge of an operative's notice.
• deLint's Scottsdale-lawn-chair laugh simile (p. 658) is a strange proleptic flash — an old man hearing his son report marital erasure — tonally kin to the book's aging-male desolations (Steeply's father, scene 123; cf. Orin's Subjects' husbands).

• pp. 655-656: "Sometimes it's hard to believe the sun's the same sun over all different parts of the planet." — the montage-logic of the book stated as weather; pairs with scene 126.
• p. 657: the line-call exchange ("Not your job to see it... You hit it too hard to see, you deserve the point") — single-entendre sportsmanship that visibly does not compute for the watching operative; irony-sincerity in miniature.
• p. 658: Steeply's serve similes ending "But all these were only parts" — spectation failing to assemble Hal; plus "his gaze somehow extending only half a meter in front of him."
• p. 659: "Hal's in essence a torturer... This way of the ball seeming just in reach, to keep you trying, running." — Hal's game as the book's addiction mechanics (the reward kept just in reach); prime anthology passage.
• pp. 660-661: "To forget themselves as objects of attention for a few years and see what they can do when the eyes are off them." — the anti-spectation pedagogy; core entertainment-self statement.
• pp. ~661-662: "they'll never be slaves to the statue... It's the machine they're all dying to throw themselves into. They don't know the machine. But we do." — deLint/Schtitt's machine speech; essential anthology passage.
• p. ~662: "Wayne's your ideal food-group. Which is why we'll keep you off him." — audiences as eaters, players as food, in the mouth of a coach.