The subterranean academy: Lyle in the weight room, the tunnels, and the academic-probation machinery

texture · ~Nov YDAU

• When: an evening in November YDAU (undated in the scene; adjacent to the post-Eschaton week)
• What: A ground-level tour of E.T.A.'s support-and-discipline underworld, overheard as blindfolded 13-year-old Idris Arslanian (running Coach Thorp's "volunteer blindness"/anticipation experiment for the incoming blind matriculant Dymphna) gropes through "the little hall off the tunnel" by the weight room. Two institutional systems surface. (1) Lyle, the academy's resident guru who lives in the weight room and subsists on players' sweat, is "trying to buck him up" (clinically/anxiously-depressed Anton Doucette) — "it's a real feeding frenzy for old Lyle" — while crueler students watch it as entertainment (Schacht: "Somebody in pain isn't entertainment"). See the Lyle timeline. (2) The academic-probation apparatus: Doucette, on "proby this whole year," fears flunking prorector Tex Watson's Energy-survey class (annular fusion) and getting "the academic Boot" at term's end — E.T.A. students must clear a real hard-science curriculum (Watson's Energy class, Thorp's cubular trig, Optics) or be expelled, tennis rank notwithstanding. The scene closes with Pemulis opening negotiations to buy devout Muslim Arslanian's guaranteed-clean urine — the first move of the clean-sample economy feeding the academy's O.N.A.N.T.A. drug-testing regime (see events 10, 22). See the Pemulis timeline.