Scene n332: pemulis expelled

• p. 1072: Dateline 17 NOV. Y.D.A.U.; "'Gracious me and mine,' Pemulis said, clutching the ankle of the leg he'd crossed to keep the foot from joggling" — composure as muscle-work. Wayne's condition: Rusk, Charles, and Mrs. Incandenza are with him; Schtitt's been up; Loach has done a reflex-check; "John Wayne's going to be OK."
• pp. 1072-1073: The room: deLint behind the high desk "looking like a mean little boy," Nwangi and Watson as window-dressing, Mrs. Inc's ventilator hissing; nobody higher than deLint shows, and Pemulis can't tell if that's good or bad.
• p. 1073: Pemulis's private reconstruction: half a salivaless sprint up to B-204 to find his pilfered Tenuates in "the little pecker's" Seldane bottle; the shudder at the 'drine hitting Wayne's "cherry-red and virgin bloodstream"; Troeltsch hasn't shown "facial-feature one" since the broadcast.
• p. 1073: His official version: he was suiting up, doing Big Buddy intervention on Possalthwaite "in crisis," when Zoltan and The Darkness came spasming in saying "Troeltsch'd jury-rigged the Duke into candid sharing for the WETA broadcast" — limp, since Wayne would've had to be sitting right at the mike; what Lateral Alice actually saw was Wayne rattling in, shoving Troeltsch aside, and grabbing the mike, while Dave Harde pitched forward narcoleptically into the blue carpet for an hour and L.A.M.'s chronic cyanosis turned her face blue.
• p. 1074: DeLint's nostril-flare at horseshit; the P.W.T.A. grudge; the trap's geometry — the dosing was a genuine accident, "if anybody's Troeltsch's," but explaining that means admitting to a 'drine, "tantamount to Clippertonizing himself," post-Eschaton, post-urologist; first sight of "the leaflet about Wayne and Mrs. I. and deviant division" in deLint's papers.
• p. 1074: The Tavis imitation reconstructed: Wayne, mannerisms "locked down from Tavis always sitting next to him on the bus back from victories," does adolescent Tavis pre-asking a Canadian cheerleader for a date — announcing his fear of rejection up front, begging her to prepare a plausible excuse while conceding the request makes any excuse implausible; it made Stice's impressions look amateur. Chillingly, in Wayne's scenario the total-candor ploy works — she lets him X her just to shut him up; "Except — chillingly — he hadn't shut up."
• p. 1074: The insult catalog, read into the record by deLint with Nwangi supplying corrections: Thorp "a palsied twit"; Francis Unwin's "on-court look of a cornered rodent"; Leith the "sort of man you always end up sitting next to at civic functions"; Ms. Richardson-Levy-O'Byrne-Chawaf chairing the "Itty Bitty Titty" committee; Schtitt "denied some kind of vitally important moisture from birth henceforward"; Nwangi the man who won't share food in a Chinese restaurant ("'Meaning mean-spirited.' Nwangi threw his head back and beamed").
• p. 1074: The two that matter: JOI "so full of himself he could have shit limbs," and doubles partner Hal "by all appearances addicted to everything that is not tied down, cannot outrun him, and is fittable in the mouth" — Pemulis's correction, "I'm remembering the word as insertable," instantly self-kicked. And Pemulis's private chill: Wayne's I-live-in-fear-of-rejection ploy is "actually in the top five or ten" of Orin's troubling 'Strategies' for X-ing young married women, as Pemulis knows from Hal.
• pp. 1074-1075: More catalog (Thode's pancake face "expanded to like fifteen seconds"; Donni Stott's attaché-case skin; deLint the man who wouldn't lend his own mother a quarter for a crutch-tip; Ms. Heath who "cries at card tricks" and dwells "at the edge of some vast continent of menstrual hysteria"; Dunkel, lost without "a nautical compass of exacting precision"; Watson's spinal "liquid-filled nubbin" in lieu of cortex) — intercut with the springing of the trap: Watson dangles the yachting cap "like something you want a dog to jump for"; from under Nwangi's chair come two pharmaceutical scales, jeweller's loupes, the tow truck's supply of empty sterile Visine bottles, and every bottle from Troeltsch's bedside table — Troeltsch having "eaten some enormous wedge of putrid deal-cutting cheese."
• p. 1075: Pemulis's counterplays: "Is the emerging point that this is going to impact my getting to go on the WhataBurger trip?"; the demand to see the Dean; "Aubs, no kidding: something pressing I have to interface about with Mrs. Inc. Tell her it concerns U.S.-Canadian relations." Nwangi, wheezing: "She sends you her regards, the Dean said to tell you."
• pp. 1075-1076: The relayed sentence — the administration "too naturally concerned about the state of one of our two very finest current talents… unwittily dosed with an artificial stimulant" to "permit itself the satisfaction of giving you" more than the Dean's best regards and "may the road rise up to meet you whitherever your future travels lie"; finish the term for credit or leave now, fat chance of a reference; Watson "said something about urine."
• p. 1076: The blackmail card burned: shout it from the highest hill, "which pretty soon won't be this one"; doorknobs rubberized and grounded, files "recryptographilated," mirrors reanodized and sealed with Plastic Wood, "Mrs. Inc said to tell you." The Shit Fairy's deck-of-cards wing-riffle, "a kind of violet incubus with the Da's saggy frown"; Pemulis, "close-mouthed and breathing with terrible ease," asks again — "And this affects the WhataBurger, my chances?" — and finds their good humor "almost infectious."

Backward

• Five days after n.321, the Tenuates Hal needled Pemulis about ("You haven't even quit the Tenuate") are the instrument of his destruction — pilfered (by Troeltsch, evidently) into the Seldane bottle Wayne raided; Troeltsch's chronic Seldane habit goes back to scene 018 (pp. 60-61).
• The "shaky pharmaceutical ground" is the Eschaton debacle (scene 073, pp. 321-342) plus the hidden O.N.A.N.T.A. urologist and 30-day window from the Tavis-office meeting (scene 102, pp. 508-527); the clean-urine enterprise in Visine bottles was established at pp. ~151-156. "Clippertonizing himself" borrows Clipperton as E.T.A. slang for self-destruction — same usage as "did a Clipperton" in n.321.
• Wayne's seduction-scenario = Orin's Strategy: Pemulis explicitly matches it to the punter's top-five techniques for young married Subjects (Orin's calls, scene 064 and n.110); Tavis's actual anxious-candor style is on full display in scene 102. Where Wayne learned it: Tavis "always sitting next to him on the bus back from victories."
• Wayne on Hal — "addicted to everything… fittable in the mouth" — broadcast to the whole Academy, is the public naming of what Hal couldn't say aloud in n.321 ("Say the word, Inc"); it lands roughly a week into Hal's white-knuckle abstinence (n.321 has him at "two-and-a-half days? three days?" already on 12 Nov; scene 167 counts "the past ten days" from 20 Nov).
• Contrast close by: "They can't kick you out" (n.90's AA) vs. the institution that absolutely can — E.T.A.'s discipline is juridical, honor-coded, and reference-backed, and lands on the one student with no family net.

Forward

• Referencing superscript: the corpus's one [n.332] callout hangs in scene 159 (pp. 787-795), on the last line of Notkin's recitation about the mother's arms. This note is where the fact of Pemulis's fate lives; Hal's late sections register aftermath only (scene 170 back-links it narratively, pp. 898-900).
• The "17-into-56" leaflet and "U.S.-Canadian relations": Pemulis's knowledge of the Avril-Wayne liaison (the tableau he walked in on, scene 108, pp. 550-553) was his hole card; the relayed countermeasures speech is Avril telling him she knows exactly how he gathered it and has already sterilized every vector. The liaison itself feeds the John Wayne/A.F.R. question late in the book.
• Pemulis's expulsion strips Hal of tutor, supplier, and co-conspirator on the eve of the climax; the remaining Pemulis-Hal business lives elsewhere: the DMZ question in scene 157 (pp. 782-785) and n.321 ("Say the word, Inc"); Pemulis's attempts to talk to Hal in scenes 172 and 179.
• The WhataBurger refrain points at the Year-of-Glad frame (scenes 001/003, pp. 3-17), which has Hal in Tucson for that very Invitational; "the Da's saggy frown" on the Shit Fairy gestures at the Pemulis-family material (Da, Matty) at scene 131, pp. 682-686; note the middle name surfacing in the sentence of expulsion: "Michael Mathew Pemulis."

• p. 1072: "'Gracious me and mine,' Pemulis said, clutching the ankle of the leg he'd crossed to keep the foot from joggling." — the brass mask, established in the first line.
• p. 1074: the Tavis-asking-for-a-date scenario ("he was going to be completely open with her…") — candor as Strategy; the Orin/Tavis/Wayne triangulation in one bit.
• p. 1074: "by all appearances addicted to everything that is not tied down, cannot outrun him, and is fittable in the mouth." / "I'm remembering the word as insertable." — Hal outed academy-wide; Pemulis's reflexive pedantry as self-incrimination.
• p. 1075: "Is the emerging point that this is going to impact my getting to go on the WhataBurger trip?" — the question asked twice; gallows deadpan as Pemulis's whole code.
• p. 1076: "the administrative office doorknobs have been rubberized and grounded, the administrative files all recryptographilated, everyone's room's mirrors reanodized and sealed with Plastic Wood, Mrs. Inc said to tell you." — Avril's checkmate by relayed courtesy.
• p. 1076: "The little deck-of-cards riffle of the wings of the Shit Fairy, which he privately envisions as a kind of violet incubus with the Da's saggy frown." — the only interiority the scene allows Pemulis at the end.