"A. deLint's show": the hearing that expels Pemulis

pivotal · 17 Nov YDAU

• When: 17 November YDAU
• What: In the Dean of Academic Affairs' office — Pemulis, deLint, Nwangi, and Watson; nobody higher up shows — deLint conducts, from behind the high desk and "looking like a mean little boy," the disciplinary interrogation that ends Michael Pemulis's E.T.A. career over the accidental dosing of John Wayne with Pemulis's pilfered Tenuate. Nwangi and Watson are window-dressing at what the text flatly calls his show: deLint walks Pemulis through a hostile reconstruction, riffles the 17-into-56 leaflet into view, reads Wayne's broadcast insults into the record while the incriminating paraphernalia (yachting cap, pharmaceutical scales, loupes, Visine bottles) is produced by Watson and from under Nwangi's chair, relays the absent Dean's coded farewell — disliking the messenger role he doesn't understand — and delivers the ultimatum: finish out the term for credit, or leave with no reference. His tell recurs: the pale nostril-flare when he smells horseshit and knows you know it. The old P.W.T.A. grudge (event 5) is paying off, and he looks pretty happy. His most consequential dramatic action.