Towel-snapping, then the summons: "There is expression. You must immediately come."

pivotal · 17 Nov YDAU, ~1420-1435h

• When: 17 Nov YDAU, early-to-mid P.M.: the locker room from ~1420h (n324) and, shortly after, Pemulis's account in the Dean of Academic Affairs' office (n332).
• What: Into the middle of Pemulis's Tenuate-dry sermon to the weeping Possalthwaite come "a couple of 16s… G. ('Yardguard') Rader and a marginal Slavic kid whose first name was Zoltan and whose last name nobody could pronounce," who ignore Freer's advice to run for their lives, throw down their gear, and get fresh towels to snap at each other — the note glossing towel-snapping as the male 16s' own brief "flared genuflection to jock-stereotype." Zoltan is pure physical comedy on the opposite bench: Freer's raised-leg vaudeville fart at Pemulis gets "a laugh from Csikszentmihalyi and Rader," and mid-sermon "Csikszentmihalyi feinted a lunge and then really lunged and there was brief flurry of terrycloth." Then the afternoon turns. The WETA speaker has crackled to life; van Slack's head pokes in saying come quick; there are "voices and running feet like some sort of ruckus"; McKenna's head appears and withdraws wordlessly, and "Csikszentmihalyi went out after him." A beat later, "Csikszentmihalyi came back in with Ortho Stice, their color high," and Zoltan speaks his only line in the book — "Cs/yi said ‘There is expression. You must immediately come.’" — with the answer to Freer's what-the-fuck that follows in the same broken register: "John Wayne is insanely holding forth innermost thoughts for public ears." (Stice, already heading back out, adds over his shoulder that Troeltsch's got Wayne on the air.) Pemulis's disciplinary-office account (n332) confirms the role from outside: "Zoltan and The Darkness come like spasming in saying Troeltsch’d jury-rigged the Duke into candid sharing for the WETA broadcast." For one afternoon the kid who barely speaks English is the Academy's herald.