Scene n324: trust math locker room

• p. 1066: Dateline. Generic-you meditation on the locker room at empty times — the stunned quality of crowded places gone quiet; the intricately lit triple mirror ("Dr. J. O. Incandenza knew his adolescents"); head custodian Dave ('F.D.V.') Harde napping on benches; Pemulis's shower-tile vocals; Schacht's commode-clearing power; the prorectors' private dicky-proof lounge.
• p. 1067: Pemulis down at ~1420h for P.M.s (sub-fn b: seniors' challenge-match perk = slack-time locker room) finds 14-A "lobber nonpareil" Possalthwaite near-nude, hunched, weeping into his hands, nose still in surgical tape; Freer shirtless at the mirror ministering to his complexion. Pemulis's locker archaeology: the factory-concealed niches and cayenne anti-sniffer-dog packets of his callow youth, superseded by "the ultimate entrepôt above the false ceiling in Subdorm B's male hallway."
• p. 1067: Freer relays the trouble: Postal Weight's old man promised so-and-so (Disney World) for thus-and-such, and now "the Dad's trying to restructure the original deal." Possalthwaite: "Nothing's true."
• p. 1068: Pemulis offers Eschaton-fallout comfort — "they're blaming nobody under 17, it turns out"; calls up the father on-screen (Minneapolis mall developer, "a dagger of a Dad"). The load-bearing parenthetical: pre-match Tenuate despite the 36-hour elimination curve (sub-fn d), because a win over Freer = the WhataBurger plane; he and "Inc" escaped on-spot urinalysis only via the implied threat to tell Hal about Avril and Wayne; Avril as "coldly-biding-her-time-not-to-be-fucked-with administrative figure"; the electrified-Rusk-doorknob-and-litigation incident; the 'drines aren't kicking in — only "enforced-feeling dryness in his eyes and mouth."
• ~p. 1069: "Certain things are rock-solid, high-grade true." Freer's hard-g angst speech ("Thirteen: pain's a rumor"). The after-lunch memory: Wayne, shirtless, rheumy, raiding sick Troeltsch's bedside table for Seldane, "the battlefield-nuke of antihistamines" (sub-fn e → n.22); Wayne down to play the Syrian Satelliter at 1515h; the unmentioned "virtuosic but tense performance in a certain administrative office a week ago"; the 11/14 Olde-English e-board leaflet announcing a Wayne/Avril arithmetic presentation "on how 17 can actually go into 56 way more than 3.294 times"; Wayne caught one foot bare, one in sock-and-shoe (scholarship-kid tell). WETA crackles on with its Joan Sutherland theme.
• ~p. 1070: "This is a like serious emotiono-philosophical deal"; Rader and Csikszentmihalyi arrive towel-snapping ("the good Dr. Pemulis had been prescribing for himself again"); sociology of the male 16s — exclusion of Stice and of Kornspan (suspected of the two burnt collarless cats found on the hillside); "the age staring down the barrel not of Is anything true but of Am I true."
• ~p. 1071: van Slack's head-and-guitar-neck summons. The sermon: "Todder, you can trust math... First-order predicate logic. Never fail you... Whose truth is deductive truth. Independent of sense or emotionality... listen: it's true." Freer: "This from a man on academic probation for who knows the length." The parametric-equations line-integral axiom (same curve traced in opposite directions → values that are negatives of each other); the litany of mathematicians as knights-of-faith rescue (Peano, Leibniz, Hilbert, L'Hôpital, Fourier, Gauss, LaPlace, Rickey, Wiener, "Reimann," Frege, Green). Running feet; McKenna's wild head-in-and-out; Csikszentmihalyi: "There is expression. You must immediately come... John Wayne is insanely holding forth innermost thoughts for public ears." Pemulis's last word to Possalthwaite: "Never trust the father you can see." Stice, over his shoulder: "Troeltsch's got Wayne on the air and Wayne's lost his mind."
• pp. 1071-1072 (~): six lettered sub-footnotes a-f: a = fuller's earth and the YTMP aluminum-impotence panic; b = seniors' 1430h challenge-match perk; c = pale feet as perverse mark of competitive status; d = Tenuate's esterase-engineered 36-hr clearance; e = q.v. n.22 (Seldane); f = the Euroclay brachiation ritual and Hartigan's Orly hysterics.

Backward

• The pill-swap implication: Pemulis came up after lunch for Tenuate and found Wayne at Troeltsch's bedside table for Seldane; Pemulis then gets no Tenuate verve, only dry eyes/mouth — Seldane's exact profile ("mucoidal desiccators," n.22) — while Wayne goes verbally disinhibited on-air. The book plants the answer in advance — scene 018 (p. 60): only the Seldane bottle "actually contains several Tenuate 75-mg. capsules Troeltsch has incrementally promoted from Pemulis's part of the room" — and n.332 adjudicates it outright: "the Wayne-dosing had been a total accident and in no way Pemulis's deal, if anybody's Troeltsch's" (pp. 1073-1074).
• Pemulis doping inside his own negotiated urine window rhymes with the planned DMZ experiment before the same deadline (n.321; DMZ provenance scenes 050 and 057).
• The JOI-designed mirror ("knew his adolescents") extends film-optics/mirror motifs; Troeltsch's match-calling habit and his illness/Seldane were established back at scene 018 (p. 60); the WETA station itself enters at scene 070 (pp. 307-312).
• The hidden-urologist thread of scene 102 runs through this note's parenthetical reveal (p. 1068) — the escape from on-the-spot urinalysis ran through Pemulis's blackmail of Avril over Wayne — and on to the quiet expulsion (n.332); the Pemulis-Hal urine-deal conversation itself is scene 155 (p. 772).
• The "certain administrative office" performance "a week ago," mentioned by neither Pemulis nor Wayne, and the 17-into-56 leaflet (Wayne 17, Avril ~56): the office scene where Pemulis catches Avril and Wayne is scene 108, pp. 550-553.
• Eschaton fallout: Possalthwaite's nose and palm bandages, "blaming nobody under 17," "Eschaton lives on... Underground or no" — direct sequel to scene 073 (pp. 321-342) and the injury inventory of n.147 (see scene 081's connections).
• The two burnt collarless cats on the hillside (blamed on Kornspan by the 16s) plausibly belong to Randy Lenz's escalating animal-killings, whose nightly-walk progression sits at pp. 538-589 (scene 105, 109, 111, 116) — flagged as reader-inference, not stated.

Forward

• Anchor in main text: scene 158 (pp. 785-787) — the [n.324] marker sits on Johnette Foltz's "Much later, in subsequent events' light" recollection of Hal's Ennet House visit, 0830h the same 17 Nov. The note is that day's E.T.A. afternoon; "subsequent events" points at the Wayne broadcast and the endgame generally.
• Wayne's on-air meltdown is the proximate ruin of E.T.A.'s #1: its aftermath surfaces at scenes 179 and 183 (pp. 941ff); cf. scene 003's YG line that Wayne "would have won this year's WhataBurger" — present-tense alive but conspicuously not winning it.

• p. 1066, "Sometimes at odd little times of day..." — the generic-you elegy for crowded places at empty times; the best mirror in the Academy.
• p. 1068, "(Pemulis calculates a win or even three-setter w/ Freer..." — the parenthetical that quietly detonates the plot: Tenuate, WhataBurger, and the Avril blackmail reveal.
• ~p. 1070, "They were the age staring down the barrel not of Is anything true but of Am I true" — the note's thesis on adolescence, doubling Possalthwaite's crisis.
• ~p. 1071, "Todder, you can trust math... The nightlight on life's dark wall, late at night... listen: it's true." — Pemulis's credo; irony-sincerity distilled.
• ~p. 1071, the line-integral axiom ("the same curve J... traced in opposite directions... negatives of each other") — an annular figure smuggled into the consolation; the book's ring traced both ways.
• ~p. 1071, "Never trust the father you can see." — last line to Possalthwaite before the Wayne news; the ghost-father inverse of family-hamlet.
• ~p. 1071, "Troeltsch's got Wayne on the air and Wayne's lost his mind." — the note's cliffhanger close.