The high-tech knight in the waiting room

pivotal · 10 Nov YDAU

• When: 10 Nov YDAU — the discipline wait outside the Headmaster's suite.
• What: On the ottoman next to Dr. Rusk sits "poor old Otis P. Lord, the Hitachi monitor still over his head like the sallet of some grotesque high-tech knight" — slumped, sneakers pointing at each other in the shag, "two crude eye-holes cut into the black plastic casing," the screen's hanging shards at his slim throat so that he must hold his head very still, a nurse "standing behind him and inclined over the back of the sofa to hold the monitor very carefully in place." His only communication is muffled and pitiful: "Lord's eyes move to Hal and blink dolefully through the holes, and he can be heard sniffing moistly in there, complexly muffled." The blame-arithmetic runs alongside — Pemulis dreads "the lion's share of the blame for damage to Lord and Possalthwaite," the room silently aware whose charges the casualties are. Even the furniture rhymes with him: Clenette's custodial cart, "like poor Otis Lord's own game-master's cart, has a crazy wheel." And on the waiting room's photo wall he appears in a happier register — the shot of Blott with the athletic supporter over his face, "Traub and Lord collapsing around him in either hilarity or horror."