The Lyle confession: crippling obsession with tennis fame

pivotal · 8 Nov YDAU — I-Day night

• When: Night of 8 November YDAU, during the I-Day gala (Mario's puppet thing audible from the dining hall), in the dark weight room
• What: In a white towel, glabrous and high-gloss, Chu haltingly confesses to Lyle an increasingly crippling secret obsession with tennis fame: he wants the Show, the hype, the hushed broadcast clichés, the product patches, to be called the next Great Yellow U.S. Hope; he clips glowing action-shots from shiny magazines and sometimes pretends one is of him. The envy has turned somatic — he can't eat or sleep or sometimes even pee — and functional: he's stopped taking risks in tournaments, and a couple of times this year the cold clenched fear of losing has itself made him lose. He is ashamed of hungering for the very hype his academy treats as talent's great Mephistophelan pitfall. Lyle's Socratic answer runs the full set-piece: the famous do not feel what Chu burns for; envy has no reciprocal; to be envied is not a feeling, nor is fame; and escape from a cage requires, foremost, awareness of the cage. The scene fixes Chu's vitals — eleven, two hands off both sides, watch worn halfway up a wrist too thin to hold it. The narrator's later aside naming him "the tormented LaMont Chu" (135) corroborates this page but is undatable and carried in Dating notes only.