'Woolly Mammoth': the hairy, thick-built galumpher of the 16's

pivotal · STANDING

• When: Ongoing — his background identity across the YDAU chapters; age 16 as of 9 Nov YDAU.
• What: Kahn is a sixteen-year-old E.T.A. player, "a.k.a. 'W.M.' for 'Woolly Mammoth' because he's so hairy." Physically the narration gives him its one full-sentence portrait wrapped in sympathy: "Hal feels for Kahn, who's not fat but is in the Schacht-type mold, very thick and solid, except also carrying extra weight in terms of leg-and-back-hair, and who always tires easily no matter how hard he conditions." The narration classes him and Eliot Kornspan together as "galumphers." Pemulis's name for him, per Hal's gloss, is another matter: "The Petropulator was Petropolis Kahn." He rooms with Graham [Rader] — theirs is the room directly below Ortho Stice's, into which Stice's ceiling-bolted bed threatens to fall. At supper he holds a curious institutional status: exiled to a separate table for how he eats, but readmitted afterward — "Now Kahn's by custom allowed to come over and sit with them at the best table, post-prandially." And he has been at the Academy a long time — the supine Hal, on 20 Nov YDAU, "closed my eyes and recalled that I'd known Petropolis Kahn for three years and three months."