"The automatic": the machine-body beauty-of-function, the undead affect, the near-total silence

pivotal · YDAU (autumn present)

• When: YDAU, the autumn present (standing characterization across the tennis scenes)
• What: Wayne's signature material: his game has "a kind of automatic beauty," a beauty of pure function — he tracks a lob by turning his back and sprinting to where it will land, needing no second look; he is "all business," face "blankly rigid, with the hypertonic masking of schizophrenics and Zen adepts," emotions emerging only "in terms of velocity," his play "less alive than undead." Off court he is near-silent (in the locker room "John Wayne hasn't said one word this whole time"; he buttons his shirt to the top button "as if he were going to put on a tie, which he doesn't even own"), eats and studies alone, is "sometimes seen with two or three expatriate E.T.A. Nucks" but "when they're together they all seem morose." Elsewhere he is the school's benchmark of grim machinery — "grim machines à la John Wayne" (scene 091), a standard against which even the anhedonic Hal measures himself as "far more robotic than John Wayne" (scene 135); on court in second gear, "notoriously tight," unable to touch below his knees during stretches (scene 094). The aura extends to whoever shares a court with him: whether in singles against him or doubles alongside, Hal "always gets the creepy feeling that Wayne has control out there not just of his voluntary CNS but also of his heartrate and blood pressure, the diameter of his pupils, etc." — a feeling "not only creepy but distracting" (n382 p. 1079).