Locker-room collapse: "Nothing's fair because nothing's true"

pivotal · 17 Nov YDAU, ~1420h

• When: 17 November YDAU, ~1420h — the empty males' locker room, as Pemulis comes down to dress for his P.M. challenge match against Freer; Todd is supposed to be in Donni Stott's Valley-Map class
• What: Pemulis finds Todd near-nude and hunched on the bench under his locker, face in his hands, nose still in horizontal strips of surgical tape, weeping and rocking, keening "Nothing's true." The cause arrives second-hand via the needling Keith ("the Viking") Freer: Todd's father — Minneapolis-area developer of malls and corporate parks, "a dagger of a Dad" in Pemulis's on-screen conjuring — promised him a reward ("Something about Disney World") for accomplishing a stated goal; Todd feels he has held up his end, and the Dad is welching, "trying to restructure the original deal." Pemulis — Postal Weight's Big Buddy and sort of lob-and-Eschaton mentor, who genuinely likes the kid — first checks whether it's the nose (reassuring him they're blaming nobody under 17 for the Eschaton), then reads the thing right: a serious emotiono-philosophical crisis, a child's trust in truth itself detonated ("If you can't trust your folks…"). His answer is an escalating sermon, over Freer's mockery, that the one thing that will never fail is math — deductive truth, independent of sense or emotionality, "the vital statistics of God or equivalent" — while Todd, sucking-reflex going, protests through the broken nose that he is not a little button ("I ab dot a little button") and relays his father's verdict on him. The sermon is cut off mid-flight by the ruckus of John Wayne's mind coming apart live on WETA; Pemulis's parting line is "Never trust the father you can see."