Herald of the Wayne-broadcast uproar: a head in the locker-room door

texture · 17 Nov YDAU, ~1430h

• When: 17 Nov YDAU, early P.M. — during the broadcast on which John Wayne, dosed via Troeltsch's bedside pharmacopia, melts down on air.
• What: In the middle of Pemulis's locker-room math sermon to the weeping Possalthwaite — "trust to the abstract deductive," "Leap like a knight of faith into the arms of Peano, Leibniz, Hilbert, L'Hôpital." — the day's chaos intrudes in McKenna's shape: "There were voices and running feet like some sort of ruckus. McKenna stuck his head in and looked wildly around and withdrew without saying anything." Csikszentmihalyi goes out after him and comes back in with Ortho Stice, their color high, with the news — "John Wayne is insanely holding forth innermost thoughts for public ears"; "Troeltsch's got Wayne on the air and Wayne's lost his mind." Freer and Rader both said What the fuck; the sermon rolls on. McKenna himself never says a word: half a second of pure plot-conduction. (He is not the uproar's first messenger — Duncan van Slack had already poked his head and guitar-neck in earlier in the note to say "come quick"; McKenna's wordless look is the ruckus's second intrusion on the sermon.)