Window-dressing at the Pemulis interrogation over the Wayne dosing

pivotal · 17 Nov YDAU

• When: 17 Nov YDAU, in the Dean of Academic Affairs' Office, after the administrators' soundproof doors shut at 1435h.
• What: Watson's fullest and least flattering appearance. "It was Pemulis, deLint, Nwangi, and Watson in the Dean of Academic Affairs' Office." — the disciplinary machinery convened over John Wayne's on-air meltdown after the accidental amphetamine dosing — and the narration assigns Watson's role in ten words: "Nwangi and Watson were window-dressing. This was A. deLint's show." Through the whole interrogation Watson slumps and stares — his eyes have "almost this nictitater of stupidity-film on them, less a dullness than a deadness, the dead porch light of nobody home at chez Tex Watson" — then produces the evidence with a small cruel flourish: "Tex Watson reached down behind the console he was slumped in his chair by and brought out Pemulis's special yachting cap and dangled it like something you want a dog to jump for." When deLint reads aloud from a confiscated leaflet's gallery of staff descriptions, Watson has to sit through his own entry — a written twin of Pemulis's spoken verdict in scene 114. His one recorded utterance in the scene is the book's driest line about him: "Tex Watson said something about urine." At the plot-hinge of the Pemulis expulsion thread he is present purely as pressure, looking "from face to face" while deLint delivers the coup de grâce.