30 APRIL — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

30 APRIL — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT

UNDERGARMENT

He sat alone above the desert, redly backlit and framed in shale, watching very yellow payloaders crawl over the beaten dirt of some U.S.A. construction site several km. to the southeast. The outcropping’s height allowed him, Marathe, to look out over most of U.S.A. area code 6026. His shadow did not yet reach the downtown regions of the city Tucson; not yet quite. Of sounds in the arid hush were only a faint and occasional hot wind, the blurred sound of the wings of sometimes an insect, some tentative trickling of loosened grit and small stones moving farther down the upslope behind.

And as well the sunset over the foothills and mountains behind him: such a difference from the watery and somehow sad spring sunsets of southwestern Québec’s Papineau regions, where his wife had need of care.

This (the sunset) more resembled an explosion. It took place above and behind him, and he turned some of the time to regard it: it (the sunset) was swollen and perfectly round, and large, radiating knives of light when he squinted. It hung and trembled slightly like a viscous drop about to fall. It hung just above the peaks of the Tortolita foothills behind him (Marathe), and slowly was sinking.

Marathe sat alone and blanket-lapped in his customized fauteuil de 37 rollent on a kind of outcropping or shelf about halfway up, waiting, amusing himself with his shadow. As the lowering light from behind came at an angle more and more acute, Goethe’s well-known ‘Bröckengespenst’ 38 phenomenon enlarged and distended his seated shadow far out overland, so that the spokes of his chair’s rear wheels cast over two whole counties below gigantic asterisk-shadows, whose fine black radial lines he could cause to move by playing slightly with the wheels’ rubber rims; and his

head’s shadow brought to much of the suburb West Tucson a premature dusk.

He appeared to remain concentrated on his huge shadow-play as gravel and then also breath sounded from the steep hillside back above him, grit and dirty stones cascading onto the outcropping and gushing past his chair and off the front lip, and then the unmistakable yelp of an individual’s impact with a cactus somewhere up behind. But Marathe, he had all the time without turning watched the other man’s clumsy sliding descent’s own mammoth shadow, cast as far east as the Rincon range just past the city Tucson, and could see the shadow rush in west toward his own as Unspecified Services’ M. Hugh Steeply descended, falling twice and cursing in U.S.A. English, until the shadow collapsed nearly into Marathe’s monstrous own. Another yelp took place as the Unspecified Services field- operative’s fall and slide the last several meters carried him upon his bottom down onto the outcropping and then nearly all the way out and off it, Marathe having to release the machine pistol under his blanket to grab Steeply’s bare arm and halt this sliding. Steeply’s skirt was pulled obscenely up and his hosiery full of runs and stubs of thorns. The operative sat at Marathe’s feet, glowing redly in the backlight, legs hanging over the shelf’s edge, breathing with difficulty.

Marathe smiled and released the operative’s arm. ‘Stealth becomes you,’ he said. ‘Go shit in your chapeau,’ Steeply wheezed, bring up his legs to survey the hosiery’s damage.

They spoke for the most part U.S.A. English when they met like this, 39 covertly, in the field. M. Fortier had wished Marathe to require that they interface always in Québecois French, as for a small symbolic concession to the A.F.R. on the part of the Office of Unspecified Services, which the Québecois Sepératiste Left referred to always as B.S.S., the ‘Bureau des Services sans Spécificité.’ Marathe watched a column of shadow spread again out east over the desert’s floor as Steeply got a hand under himself and rose, a huge and well- fed figure tottering on heels. The two men sent together a strange Bröckengespenst-shadow out toward the city Tucson, a shadow round and radial at the base and jagged at the top, from Steeply’s wig becoming un-

combed in his descent. Steeply’s gigantic prosthetic breasts pointed in wildly different directions now, one nearly at the empty sky. The matte curtain of sunset’s true dusk-shadow was moving itself very slowly in across the Rincons and Sonora desert east of the city Tucson, still many km. from obscuring their own large shadow.

But once Marathe had committed not just to pretend to betray his Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents in order to secure advanced medical care for the medical needs of his wife, but to in truth do this — betray, perfidiously: now pretending only to M. Fortier and his A.F.R. superiors that he was merely pretending to feed some betraying information to B.S.S.

40 — once this decision, Marathe was without all power, served now at the pleasures of the power of Steeply and the B.S.S. of Hugh Steeply: and now they spoke mostly the U.S.A. English of Steeply’s preference.

In fact, Steeply’s Québecois was better than Marathe’s English, but c’était la guerre, as one says.

Marathe sniffed slightly. ‘Thus, so, we now are both here.’ He wore a windbreaker and did not perspire.

Steeply’s eyes were luridly made up. The rear area of his dress was dirty.

Some of his makeup had started to run. He was forming a type of salute to shade his eyes and looking upward behind them at what remained of the explosive and trembling sun. ‘How in God’s name did you get up here?’ Marathe slowly shrugged. As usual, he appeared to Steeply as if he were half-asleep. He ignored the question and said only, shrugging, ‘My time is finite.’ Steeply had also with him a woman’s handbag or purse. ‘And the wife?’ he said, gazing upward as yet. ‘How’s the wife doing?’ ‘Holding her own weight, thank you,’ Marathe said. His tone of his voice betrayed nothing. ‘And so thus what is it your Offices believe they wish to know?’ Steeply tottered on a leg as he removed one shoe and poured from it grit. ‘Nothing terribly surprising. A bit of razzle-dazzle up northeast in your so- called Ops-area, certainly you heard.’ Marathe sniffed. A large odor of inexpensive and high-alcohol perfume came not from Steeply’s person but from his handbag, which failed to complement his shoes. Marathe said, ‘Dazzle?’

‘As in a civilian-type individual receives a certain item. Don’t tell me this is news to you guys. Not on InterLace pulse, this item. Arrives via normal physical mail. We’re sure you heard, Rémy. A cartridge-copy of a certain let’s call it between ourselves “the Entertainment.” As in in the mail, without warning or motive. Out of the blue.’ ‘From somewhere blue?’ The B.S.S. operative had perspired also through his rouge, and his mascara had melted to become whorish. ‘A person with no political value to anybody except that the Saudi Ministry of Entertainment made one the hell of a shrill stink.’ ‘The medical attaché, the specialist of digesting, you refer to.’ Marathe shrugged again in that maddening Francophone way that can mean several things. ‘Your offices wish to ask was the Entertainment’s cartridge disseminated through our mechanisms?’ ‘Don’t let’s waste your finite time, ami old friend,’ Steeply said. ‘The mischief happens to occur in metropolitan Boston. Postal codes route the package through the desert Southwest, and we know your dissemination- scheme’s routing mechanism is proposed for somewhere between Phoenix and the border down here.’ Steeply had worked hard at feminizing his expressions and gesturing. ‘It would be a bit starry-eyed of O.U.S. not to think of your distinguished cell, no?’ Beneath Marathe’s windbreaker was a sportshirt whose breast pocket was filled with many pens. He said: ‘Us, we don’t have the information on even casualties. From this blue dazzle you speak of.’ Steeply was trying to extract something stubborn from inside his other shoe. ‘Upwards of twenty, Rémy. Out of commission altogether. The attaché and his wife, the wife a Saudi citizen. Four more raggers, all with embassy cards. Couple neighbors or something. The rest mostly police before word got to a level they could stop police from going in before they

killed the power.’

‘Local police forces. Gendarmes.’

‘The local constabulary.’ ‘The minions of the law of the land.’ ‘The local constabulary were shall we say unprepared for an Entertainment like this.’ Steeply even removed and replaced his pumps in the upright-on-one-leg-bringing-other-foot-up-behind-his-bottom way of a

feminine U.S.A. woman. But he appeared huge and bloated as a woman, not merely unattractive but inducing something like sexual despair. He said, ‘The attaché had diplomatic status, Rémy. Mideast. Saudi. Said to be close to minor members of the royal family.’ Marathe sniffed hard, as if congested of the nose. ‘A puzzling,’ he said. ‘But also a compatriot of yours. Canadian citizenship. Born in Ottawa, to Arab émigrés. Visa lists a residence in Montreal.’ ‘And Services Without Specificity wishes maybe to ask were there below-the-surface connections that make the individual not such a civilian, unconnected. To ask of us would the A.F.R. wish to make of him the example.’ Steeply was removing dirt from his bottom, swatting himself on the bottom. He stood more or less directly over Marathe. Marathe sniffed. ‘We have neither digestive medicals nor diplomatic entourages on any lists for action. You have personally seen A.F.R.’s initial lists. Nor in particular Montreal civilians. We have, as one will say, larger seafood to cook.’ Steeply was looking out over the desert and city, also, as he swatted at himself. He seemed to have noticed the gespenst-phenomenon of his own shadow. Marathe for some reason pretended again to sniff the nose. The wind was moderate and constant and of about the temperature of a U.S.A. clothes-dryer set on Low. It made the shrill whistling sounds. Also sounds of the blowing grit. Weeds-of-tumbling like enormous hairballs rolled often across the Interstate Highway of I-10 far below. Their specular perspective, the reddening light on vast tan stone and the oncoming curtain of dusk, the further elongation of their monstrous agnate shadows: all was almost mesmerizing. Neither man seemed able to look at anything but the vista below. Marathe could simultaneously speak in English and think in French.

The desert was the tawny color of the hide of the lion. Their speaking without looking at one another, facing both the same direction — this gave their conversing an air of careless intimacy, as of old friends at the cartridge-viewer together, or a long-married couple. Marathe thought this as he opened and closed his upheld hand, making over the city Tucson a huge and black blossom open itself and close itself.

And Steeply raised his bare arms and held them out and crossed them, maybe as if signalling for distant aid; this made X’s and pedentive V’s over much in the city Tucson. ‘Still, Rémy, but born in the hated-by-you Ottawa,

this civilian attaché, and connected to a major buyer of trans-grid entertainment. And follow-up out of the Boston offices reports possible indications of the victim’s prior possible involvement with the widow of the auteur we both know was responsible for the Entertainment in the first

place. The samizdat.’ ‘Prior?’ Steeply produced from his handbag Belgian cigarettes of a many-mm. and habitually female type. ‘Film director’s wife’d taught out at Brandeis where the victim’d done his residency. The husband was on board over at A.E.C., and different agencies’ background checks indicated the wife was fucking just about everything with a pulse.’ With the slight pause of which Steeply could excel: ‘Particularly a Canadian pulse.’ ‘Involvement of sexuality is what you are meaning, then, not politics.’ Steeply said, ‘This wife herself a Québecer, Rémy, from L’Islet county — Chief Tine says three years spent on Ottawa’s “Personnes Qui On Doit” list. There’s such a thing as political sex.’ ‘I have said to you all we know. Civilians as individual warnings to O.N.A.N. are not our desire. This is known by you.’ Marathe’s eyes looked nearly closed. ‘And your tits, they have become cock-eyed, I will tell you.

Services Without Specificity, they have given you ridiculous tits, and now they point differently.’ Steeply looked down at himself. One of the false breasts (surely false: surely they would not go as far as the hormonal, Marathe thought) nearly touched the chins of Steeply when his looking down produced his double chins. ‘I was asked to secure personal verification, is all,’ he said. ‘My general sense at the Office is the brass consider the whole incident a stumper. There’re theories and countertheories. There are even antitheories positing error, mistaken identity, sick hoax.’ His shrugging, with his hands on the prosthesis, appeared not at all Gallic. ‘Still: twenty-three human beings lost for all time: that’d be some hoax, no?’ Marathe sniffed. ‘Asked to verify by our mutual M. Tine? How you call him: “Rod, a God”?’ (Rodney Tine, Sr., Chief of Unspecified Services, acknowledged architect of O.N.A.N. and continental Reconfiguration, who held the ear of the White House of U.S.A., and whose stenographer had long doubled as the stenographer-cum-jeune-fille-de-Vendredi of M. DuPlessis, former asst.

coordinator of the pan-Canadian Resistance, and whose passionate, ill- disguised attachment (Tine’s) to this double-amaneunsis — one Mlle. Luria Perec, of Lamartine, county L’Islet, Québec — gave rise to these questions 41 of the high-level loyalties of Tine, whether he ‘doubled’ for Québec out of the love for Luria or ‘tripled’ the loyalties, pretending only to divulge secrets while secretly maintaining his U.S.A. fealty against the pull of an irresistible love, it was said.) ‘The, Rémy.’ It was clear that Steeply could not fix his breasts’ directions without pulling down severely his décolletage, which he was shy to do. He produced from his handbag sunglasses and put on the sunglasses.

They were embellished with rhinestones and looked absurd. ‘Rod the God.’ Marathe forced himself to say nothing of their appearance. Steeply tried with several matches to light a cigarette in the wind. The encroachment of true dusk began to erase his wig’s chaotic shadow. Electric lights began to twinkle in the Rincon foothills east of the city. Steeply tried somewhat to cup his body around the match, for shelter for the flame.

It’s a herd of feral hamsters, a major herd, thundering across the yellow plains of the southern reaches of the Great Concavity in what used to be Vermont, raising dust that forms a uremic-hued cloud with somatic shapes interpretable from as far away as Boston and Montreal. The herd is descended from two domestic hamsters set free by a Watertown NY boy at the beginning of the Experialist migration in the subsidized Year of the Whopper. The boy now attends college in Champaign IL and has forgotten that his hamsters were named Ward and June.

The noise of the herd is tornadic, locomotival. The expression on the hamsters’ whiskered faces is businesslike and implacable — it’s that implacable-herd expression. They thunder eastward across pedalferrous terrain that today is fallow, denuded. To the east, dimmed by the fulvous cloud the hamsters send up, is the vivid verdant ragged outline of the annularly overfertilized forests of what used to be central Maine.

All these territories are now property of Canada.

With respect to a herd of this size, please exercise the sort of common sense that come to think of it would keep your thinking man out of the southwest Concavity anyway. Feral hamsters are not pets. They mean business. Wide berth advised. Carry nothing even remotely vegetablish if in

the path of a feral herd. If in the path of such a herd, move quickly and calmly in a direction perpendicular to their own. If American, north not advisable. Move south, calmly and in all haste, toward some border metropolis — Rome NNY or Glens Falls NNY or Beverly MA, say, or those bordered points between them at which the giant protective ATHSCME fans atop the hugely convex protective walls of anodized Lucite hold off the drooling and piss-colored bank of teratogenic Concavity clouds and move the bank well back, north, away, jaggedly, over your protected head.

The heavy-tongued English of Steeply was even more difficult to understand with a cigarette in the mouth. He said, ‘And you’ll of course report this little interface of you and me right back to Fortier.’ Marathe shrugged. ‘ ’n sûr.’ Steeply got it lit. He was a large and soft man, some type of brutal-U.S.- contact-sport athlete now become fat. He appeared to Marathe to look less like a woman than a twisted parody of womanhood. Electrolysis had caused patches of tiny red pimples along his jowls and upper lip. He also held his elbow out, the arm holding the match for lighting, which is how no woman lights a cigarette, who is used to breasts and keeps the lighting elbow in.

Also Steeply teetered ungracefully on his pumps’ heels on the stone’s uneven surface. He never for a moment turned his back completely at Marathe as he stood on the lip of the outcropping. And Marathe had his chair’s wheels’ clamps now locked down tight and a firm grip on the machine pistol’s pebbled grip. Steeply’s purse was small and glossy black, and the sunglasses he wore had womanly frames with small false jewels at the temples. Marathe believed that something in Steeply enjoyed his grotesque appearance and craved the humiliation of the field-disguises his B.S.S. superiors requested of him.

Steeply now looked at him, in probability, behind the dark glasses. ‘And also that I just right now asked you if you’d report it, and that you said bien sûr?’ Marathe’s laugh had this misfortune to sound false and overhearty, whether or not sincere. He made a mustache of his finger, pretending for some reason to stifle a need to sneeze. ‘You verify this because of why?’

Steeply scratched under the hem of his blonde wig with (stupidly, dangerously) the thumb of his hand that held the cigarette. ‘Well you are already tripling, Rémy, aren’t you? Or would it be quadrupling. We know Fortier and the A.F.R. know you’re here with me now.’ ‘But do my brothers on wheels know that you are knowing this, that they have sent me to pretend I double?’ Marathe’s sidearm, a Sterling UL35 9 mm machine pistol with a Mag Na Port silencer, did not have a safety. Its fat and texture-of-pebbles grip was hot from Marathe’s palm, and in turn caused Marathe’s palm to perspire beneath the blanket. From Steeply there merely was silence.

Marathe said: ‘… have I merely pretended to pretend to pretend to 42betray.’ And the desert U.S.A.’s light had become now sad, more than half the round sun gone behind the Tortolitas. Only now the chair’s wheels and Steeply’s thick legs cast shadows below the dusk-line, and these shadows were becoming squat and retreating back up toward the two men.

Steeply did a brief pretend-Charleston, playing with his legs’ shadows. ‘Nothing personal. You know that. It’s the obsessive caution. Who was it — who once said we get paid to drive ourselves crazy, the caution thing? You guys and Tine — your DuPlessis always suspected he tried to hold back on the information he passed sexually to Luria.’ Marathe shrugged hard. ‘And abruptly M. DuPlessis has now passed away from life. Under circumstances of almost ridiculous suspicion.’ Again with the false-sounding laugh. ‘An inept burglary and grippe indeed.’ Both men were silent. Steeply’s left arm had on it a nasty mesquite scratch, Marathe could observe.

Marathe finally glanced at his watch, its dial illuminated in his body’s shadow. Both men’s shadows were now climbing the steep incline, returning up to them. ‘Me, I think that we go about our affairs in a more simple manner than your B.S.S. office. If M. Tine’s betrayal were incomplete, we of Québec would be aware.’ ‘Because of Luria.’ Marathe pretended to fuss with his blanket, rearranging it. ‘But yes. The caution. Luria would be aware.’

Steeply stepped gingerly up to the edge and tossed out his cigarette’s stub. The wind caught the stub and it soared slightly upward from his hand, moving east. Both men were silent until the butt fell and hit the dark mountainside off below them, a tiny bloom of orange. Their silence then became contemplative. Something tight in the air between them loosened.

Marathe no longer felt the sun on his skull. Dusk settled about them.

Steeply had found his triceps’ scratch and twisted the flesh of his arm to examine it, his rouged lips rounded with concern.

YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

Tuesday, 3 November, Enfield Tennis Academy: A.M. drills, shower, eat, class, lab, class, class, eat, prescriptive-grammar exam, lab/class, conditioning run, P.M. drills, play challenge match, play challenge match, upper-body circuits in weight room, sauna, shower, slump to locker-room floor w/ other players. ‘… to even realize what they’re sitting there feeling is unhappiness? Or to even feel it in the first place?’ 1640h.: the Comm.-Ad. Bldg.’s males’ locker room is full of clean upper-classmen in towels after P.M. matches, the players’ hair wet-combed and shining with Barbicide. Pemulis uses the comb’s big-toothed end to get that wide-furrowed look that kids from Allston favor. Hal’s own hair tends to look wet-combed even when it’s dry. ‘So,’ Jim Troeltsch says, looking around. ‘So what do you think?’ Pemulis lowers himself to the floor by the sinks, leaning up against the cabinet where they keep all the disinfectants. He has this way of looking warily to either side of him before he says anything. ‘Was there like a central point to all that, Troeltsch?’ ‘The exam was talking about the syntax of Tolstoy’s sentence, not about real unhappy families,’ Hal says quietly.

John Wayne, as do most Canadians, lifts one leg slightly to fart, like the fart was some kind of task, standing at his locker, waiting for his feet to get dry enough to put on socks.

There is a silence. Showerheads dribble on tile. Steam hangs. Distant ghastly sounds from T. Schacht over in one of the stalls off the showers.

Everyone stares into the middle distance, stunned with fatigue. Michael Pemulis, who can stand about ten seconds of communal silence tops, clear his throat deeply and sends a loogie up and back into the sink behind him.

The plate mirrors caught part of its quivering flight, Hal sees. Hal closes his

eyes. ‘Tired,’ someone exhales.

Ortho Stice and John (‘N.R.’) Wayne seem less fatigued than detached; they have the really top player’s way of shutting the whole neural net down for brief periods, staring at the space they took up, hooded in silence, removed, for a moment, from the connectedness of all events. ‘Right then,’ Troeltsch says. ‘Pop quiz. Pop test-question. Most crucial difference, for Leith tomorrow, between your historical broadcast TV set and a cartridge-capable TP.’ Disney R. Leith teaches E.T.A.’s History of Entertainment I and II as well as certain high-level esoteric Optics things you needed Permission of Inst. to get into. ‘The Cathodeluminescent Panel. No cathode gun. No phosphenic screen.

Two to the screen’s diagonal width in cm. lines of resolution, total.’ ‘You mean a high-def. viewer in general, or a specifically TP-

component viewer?’ ‘No analogs,’ Struck says. ‘No snow, no faint weird like ghostly double next to UHF images, no

vertical roll when planes fly over.’ ‘Analogs v. digitals.’ ‘You referring to broadcast as in network versus a TP, or network-plus- cable versus a TP?’ ‘Did cable TV use analogs? What, like pre-fiber phones?’ ‘It’s the digitals. Leith has that word he uses for the shift from analogs to digitals. That word he uses about eleven times an hour.’ ‘What did pre-fiber phones use, exactly?’ ‘The old tin-can-and-string principle.’ ‘ “Seminal.” He keeps saying it. “Seminal, seminal.” ’ ‘The biggest advance in home communications since the phone he says.’ ‘In home entertainment since the TV itself.’ ‘Leith might say the Write-Capable CD, for entertainment.’

‘He’s hard to pin down if you get him on entertainment qua entertainment.’ ‘The Diz’ll say use your own judgment,’ Pemulis says. ‘Axford took it last year. He wants an argument made. He’ll skewer you if you treat it like there’s an obvious answer.’ ‘Plus there’s the InterLace de-digitizer instead of an antenna, with a TP,’ Jim Struck says, squeezing at something behind his ear. Graham (‘Yard- guard’) Rader is checking his underarm for more hair. Freer and Shaw might be asleep.

Stice has pulled his towel down slightly and is fingering the deep red abdominal stripe a jock’s waistband leaves. ‘Boys, I ever become president, the first thing to go’s elastic.’ Troeltsch pretends to shuffle cards. ‘Next item. Next like flash-card.

Define acutance. Anybody?’ ‘A measure of resolution directly proportional to the resolved ratio of a given pulse’s digital code,’ Hal says. ‘The Incster has the last word once again,’ says Struck. Which invites a

chorus:

‘The Halster.’

‘Halorama.’ ‘Halation.’ ‘Halation,’ Rader says. ‘A halo-shaped exposure-pattern around light sources seen on chemical film at low speed.’ ‘That most angelic of distortions.’ Struck says ‘We’ll be like vying for the seats all around Inc tomorrow.’ Hal shuts his eyes: he can see the page of text right there, all highlighted, all yellowed up. ‘He can scan the page, rotate it, fold the corner down and clean under

his nails with it, all mentally.’ ‘Leave him alone,’ Pemulis says.

Freer opens his eyes. ‘Do a dictionary-page for us, man, Inc.’ Stice says ‘Leave him be.’ It’s all only half-nasty. Hal is placid about getting his balls smacked around; they all are. He does his share of chops-busting. Some of the littler kids who take their showers after the upperclassmen are hanging around

listening. Hal sits on the floor, quiescent, chin on his chest, just thinking it’s nice finally to breathe and get enough air.

The temperature had fallen with the sun. Marathe listened to the cooler evening wind roll across the incline and desert floor. Marathe could sense or feel many million floral pores begin slowly to open, hopeful of dew. The American Steeply produced small exhalations between his teeth as he examined his scratch of the arm. Only one or two remaining tips of the digitate spikes of the radial blades of the sun found crevices between the Tortolitas’ peaks and probed at the roof of the sky. There were the slight and dry locationless rustlings of small living things that wish to come out at night, emerging. The sky was violet.

Everyone in the locker room’s got a towel around his waist like a kilt.

Everyone except Stice has a white E.T.A. towel; Stice uses his own sort of trademark towels, black ones. After a silence Stice shoots some air out through his nose. Jim Struck picks liberally at his face and neck. There are one or two sighs. Peter Beak and Evan Ingersoll and Kent Blott, twelve, eleven, ten, are up sitting on the blond-wood benches that run in front of the lockers’ rows, sitting there in towels, elbows on knees, not taking part. So is Zoltan Csikzentmihalyi, who’s sixteen but speaks very little English. Idris Arslanian, new this year, ethnically vague, fourteen, all feet and teeth, is a shadowy lurking presence just outside the locker-room door, poking the non-Caucasoid snout in occasionally and then withdrawing, terribly shy.

Each E.T.A. player in 18-and-Unders has like four to six 14-and-Unders kids he’s supposed to keep his more experienced wing over, look out for.

The more the E.T.A. administration trusts you, the younger and more generally clueless the little kids in your charge. Charles Tavis instituted the practice and calls it the Big Buddy System in the literature he sends new kids’ parents. So the parents can feel their kid’s not getting lost in the institutional shuffle. Beak, Blott, and Arslanian are all in Hal’s Big Buddy group for Y.D.A.U. He also in effect has Ingersoll, having traded Todd (‘Postal-Weight’) Possalthwaite to Axford off the books for Ingersoll, because Trevor Axford found he so despised the Ingersoll kid for some unanalyzable reason that he was struggling against a horrible compulsion to put Ingersoll’s little fingers into the gap by the hinges of an open door and

then very slowly close the door, and came to Hal almost in tears, Axford had. Though technically Ingersoll is still Axford’s and Possalthwaite Hal’s.

Possalthwaite, the great lobber, has a weird young-old face and little wet lips that lapse into a sucking reflex under stress. In theory, a Big Buddy’s somewhere between an R.A. and a prorector. He’s there to answer questions, ease bumpy transitions, show ropes, act as liaison with Tony Nwangi and Tex Watson and the other prorectors specializing in little kids.

Be somebody they can come to off the record. A shoulder to climb up on a footstool and cry on. If a 16-and-Under gets made a Big Buddy it’s kind of an honor; it means they think you’re going places. When there’s no tournament or travel, etc., Big Buddies get together with their quar-to-sextet in small-group private twice a week, in the interval between P.M. challenge matches and dinner, usually after saunas and showers and a few minutes of sitting slumped around the locker room sucking air. Sometimes Hal sits with his Little Buddies at dinner and eats with them. Not often, however.

The savvier Big Buddies don’t get too overly close with their L.B. ephebes, don’t let them forget about the unbridgeable gaps of experience and ability and general status that separate ephebes from upperclassmen who’ve hung in and stuck it out at E.T.A. for years and years. Gives them more to look up to. The savvy Big Buddy doesn’t rush in or tread heavy; he holds his own ground and lets the suppliants realize when they need his help and come to him. You have to know when to tread in and take an active hand and when to hang back and let the littler kids learn from the personal experience they’ll have to learn from, inevitably, if they want to be able to hang. Every year, the biggest source of attrition, besides graduating 18s, is 13–15s who’ve had enough and just can’t hang. This happens; the administration accepts it; not everyone’s cut out for what’s required of you here. Though C.T. makes his administrative assistant Lateral Alice Moore drive the prorectors bats trying to ferret out data on littler kids’ psychic states, so he can forecast probable burnouts and attritive defections, so he’ll know how many slots he and Admissions’ll have to offer Incomings for the next term.

Big Buddies are in a tricky position, requested to keep the prorectors generally informed about who among their charges seems shaky in terms of resolve, capacity for suffering and stress, physical punishment, homesickness, deep fatigue, but at the same time wanting to remain a

trustworthy confidential shoulder and wing for their Little Buddies’ most private and delicate issues.

Though he, too, has to struggle with a strange urge to be cruel to Ingersoll, who reminds him of someone he dislikes but can’t quite place, Hal on the whole rather likes being a Big B. He likes being there to come to, and likes delivering little unpretentious minilectures on tennis theory and E.T.A. pedagogy and tradition, and getting to be kind in a way that costs him nothing. Sometimes he finds out he believes something that he doesn’t even know he believed until it exits his mouth in front of five anxious little hairless plump trusting clueless faces. The twice-weekly (more like once- weekly, as things usually pan out) group interfaces with his quintet are unpleasant only after a particularly bad P.M. session on the courts, when he’s tired and on edge and would far rather go off by himself and do secret stuff in underground ventilated private.

Jim Troeltsch feels at his glands. John Wayne is of the sock-and-a-shoe, sock-and-a-shoe school. ‘Tired,’ Ortho Stice again sighs. He pronounces it ‘tard.’ To a man, now, the upperclassmen are down slumped on the locker room’s blue crush carpet, their legs straight out in front of them, toes pointing out at that distinctive morgue-angle, their backs up against the blue steel of the lockers, careful to avoid the six sharp little louvered antimildew vents at each locker’s base. All of them look a bit silly naked because of their tennis tans: legs and arms the deep sienna of a quality catcher’s mitt, from the summer, the tan just now this late starting to fade, but feet and ankles of toadbelly-white, the white of the grave, with chests and shoulders and upper arms more like off-white — the players can sit shirtless in the stands at tournaments when they’re not playing and get at least a bit of thoracic sun.

The faces are the worst, maybe, most red and shiny, some still deep-peeling from three straight weeks of outdoor tournaments in August-September.

Besides Hal, who’s atavistically dark-complected anyway, the ones here with the least bad piebald coloring are the players who can tolerate spraying themselves down with Lemon Pledge before outdoor play. It turns out Lemon Pledge, when it’s applied in pre-play stasis and allowed to dry to a thin crust, is a phenomenal sunscreen, UV-rating like 40+, and the only stuff anywhere that can survive a three-set sweat. No one knows what jr. player at what academy found this out about Pledge, years back, or how: rather

bizarre discovery-circumstances are envisioned. The smell of sweat-wet Pledge out on the court makes some of the more delicately constituted kids sick, though. Others feel sunscreen of any kind to be unconscionably pussified, like white visors or on-court sunglasses. So most of the E.T.A. upperclassmen have these vivid shoe-and-shirt tans that give them the classic look of bodies hastily assembled from different bodies’ parts, especially when you throw in the heavily muscled legs and usually shallow chests and the two arms of different sizes. ‘Tard tard tard,’ Stice says.

Group empathy is expressed via sighs, further slumping, small spastic gestures of exhaustion, the soft clanks of skulls’ backs against the lockers’ thin steel. ‘My bones are ringing the way sometimes people say their ears are ringing, I’m so tired.’ ‘I’m waiting til the last possible second to even breathe. I’m not expanding the cage till driven by necessity of air.’ ‘So tired it’s out of tired’s word-range,’ Pemulis says. ‘Tired just doesn’t do it.’ ‘Exhausted, shot, depleted,’ says Jim Struck, grinding at his closed eye with the heel of his hand. ‘Cashed. Totalled.’ ‘Look.’ Pemulis pointing at Struck. ‘It’s trying to think.’

‘A moving thing to see.’

‘Beat. Worn the heck out.’ ‘Worn the fuck-all out is more like.’ ‘Wrung dry. Whacked. Tuckered out. More dead than alive.’ ‘None even come close, the words.’ ‘Word-inflation,’ Stice says, rubbing at his crewcut so his forehead wrinkles and clears. ‘Bigger and better. Good greater greatest totally great.

Hyperbolic and hyperbolicker. Like grade-inflation.’ ‘Should be so lucky,’ says Struck, who’s been on academic probation since fifteen.

Stice is from a part of southwest Kansas that might as well be Oklahoma. He makes the companies that give him clothes and gear give him all black clothes and gear, and his E.T.A. cognomen is ‘The Darkness.’ Hal raises his eyebrows at Stice and smiles. ‘Hyperbolicker?’ ‘My daddy as a boy, he’d have said “tuckered out”’ll do just fine.’

‘Whereas here we are sitting here needing whole new words and terms.’ ‘Phrases and clauses and models and structures,’ Troeltsch says, referring again to a prescriptive exam everyone but Hal wishes now to forget. ‘We need an inflation-generative grammar.’ Keith Freer makes a motion as if taking his unit out of his towel and holding it out at Troeltsch: ‘Generate this.’ ‘Need a whole new syntax for fatigue on days like this,’ Struck says. ‘E.T.A.’s best minds on the problem. Whole thesauruses digested, analyzed.’ Makes a sarcastic motion. ‘Hal?’ One semion that still works fine is holding your fist up and cranking at it with the other hand so the finger you’re giving somebody goes up like a drawbridge. Though of course Hal’s mocking himself at the same time.

Everybody agrees it speaks volumes. Idris Arslanian’s shoes and incisors appear briefly in the doorway’s steam, then withdraw. Everyone’s reflection is sort of cubist in the walls’ shiny tiling. The name handed down paternally from an Umbrian five generations past and now much diluted by N.E.

Yankee, a great-grandmother with Pima-tribe Indian S.W. blood, and Canadian cross-breeding, Hal is the only extant Incandenza who looks in any way ethnic. His late father had been as a young man darkly tall, high flat Pima-tribe cheekbones and very black hair Brylcreemed back so tight there’d been a kind of enforced widow’s peak. Himself had looked ethnic, but he isn’t extant. Hal is sleek, sort of radiantly dark, almost otterish, only slightly tall, eyes blue but darkly so, and unburnable even w/o sunscreen, his untanned feet the color of weak tea, his nose ever unpeeling but slightly shiny. His sleekness isn’t oily so much as moist, milky; Hal worries secretly that he looks half-feminine. His parents’ pregnancies must have been all-out chromosomatic war: Hal’s eldest brother Orin had got the Moms’s Anglo- Nordo-Canadian phenotype, the deep-socketed and lighter-blue eyes, the faultless posture and incredible flexibility (Orin was the only male anybody at E.T.A.’d ever heard of who could do a fully splayed cheerleader-type split), the rounder and more protrusive zygomatics.

Hal’s next-oldest brother Mario doesn’t seem to resemble much of anyone they know.

On most of the nontravel days that he doesn’t Big Buddy with his charges, Hal will wait till most everybody’s busy in the sauna and shower and stow his sticks in his locker and stroll casually down the cement steps

into E.T.A.’s system of tunnels and chambers. He has some way he can casually drift off and have quite a while go by before anyone even notices his absence. He’ll often stroll casually back into the locker room just as people are slumped on the floor in towels discussing fatigue, carrying his gear bag and substantially altered in mood, and go in when most of the littler kids are in there peeling Pledge-husks off their limbs and taking their turn showering, and shower, using one of the kids’ shampoo out of a bottle shaped like a cartoon character, then hike the head back and apply Visine in a Schacht-free stall, gargle and brush and floss and dress, usually not even needing to comb his hair. He carries Visine AC, mint-flavored floss, and a traveller’s toothbrush in a pocket of his Dunlop gear bag. Ted Schacht, big into oral hygiene, regards Hal’s bag’s floss and brush as an example to them

all. ‘So tired it’s like I’m almost high.’ ‘But not pleasantly high,’ Troeltsch says. ‘It’d be a pleasanter tiredness- high if I didn’t have to wait till fucking 1900 to start all this studyin’,’ Stice says. ‘You’d think Schtitt could at least not turn up the juice the week before midterms.’ ‘You’d think that the coaches and the teachers could try and get together on their scheduling.’ ‘It’d be like a pleasant fatigue if I could just go up after dinner and hunker on down with the mind in neutral and watch something uncomplex.’ ‘Not have to worry about prescriptive forms or acutance.’ ‘Kick back.’ ‘Watch something with chase scenes and lots of stuff blowing up all over the place.’ ‘Relax, do bongs, kick back, look at lingerie catalogues, eat granola with a great big wooden spoon,’ Struck says wistfully. ‘Get laid.’ ‘Just get one night off to like R and R.’ ‘Slip on the old environmental suit and listen to some atonal jazz.’ ‘Have sex. Get laid.’ ‘Bump uglies. Do the nasty. Haul ashes.’ ‘Find me one of them Northeast Oklahoma drive-in burger-stand waitresses with the great big huge titties.’ ‘Those enormous pink-white French-painting tits that sort of like tumble out.’ ‘One of those wooden spoons so big you can barely get your mouth around it.’

‘Just one night to relax and indulge.’ Pemulis belts out two quick verses of Johnny Mathis’s ‘Chances Are,’ left over from the shower, then subsides to examine something on his left thigh. Shaw has a spit-bubble going, growing to such exceptional size for just spit that half the room watches until it finally goes at the same moment Pemulis breaks off.

Evan Ingersoll says ‘We get off Saturday for Interdependence Day Eve, though, the board said.’ Several upperclass heads are cocked up at Ingersoll. Pemulis makes a bulge in his cheek with his tongue and moves it around. ‘Flubbaflubba’: Stice makes his jowls fly around. ‘We get off classes is all. Drills and challenges go merrily on, deLint says,’ Freer points out. ‘But no drills Sunday, before the Gala.’ ‘But still matches.’ Every jr. player presently in this room is ranked in the top 64 continentally, except Pemulis, Yardley and Blott.

There’d be clear evidence that T. Schacht’s still in one of the toilet stalls off the showers even if Hal couldn’t see the tip of one of Schacht’s enormous purple shower thongs under the door of the stall right by where the shower-area entryway cuts into his line of sight. Something humble, placid even, about inert feet under stall doors. The defecatory posture is an accepting posture, it occurs to him. Head down, elbows on knees, the fingers laced together between the knees. Some hunched timeless millennial type of waiting, almost religious. Luther’s shoes on the floor beneath the chamber pot, placid, possibly made of wood, Luther’s 16th-century shoes, awaiting epiphany. The mute quiescent suffering of generations of salesmen in the stalls of train-station johns, heads down, fingers laced, shined shoes inert, awaiting the acid gush. Women’s slippers, centurions’ dusty sandals, dock-workers’ hobnailed boots, Popes’ slippers. All waiting, pointing straight ahead, slightly tapping. Huge shaggy-browed men in skins hunched just past the firelight’s circle with wadded leaves in one hand, waiting.

43 Schacht suffered from Crohn’s Disease, a bequest from his ulcerative- colitic dad, and had to take carminative medication with every meal, and took a lot of guff about his digestive troubles, and had developed of all things arthritic gout, too, somehow, because of the Crohn’s Disease, which had settled in his right knee and caused him terrible pain on the court.

Freer’s and Tall Paul Shaw’s racquets fall off the bench with a clatter, and Beak and Blott move fast to pick them up and stack them back on the bench, Beak one-handed because the other hand is keeping his towel fastened. ‘Because so that was let’s see,’ Struck says.

Pemulis loves to sing around tile.

Struck’s hitting his palm with a finger for either emphasis or ordinal counting. ‘Close to let’s call it an hour run for the A-squads, an hour-fifteen drills, two matches back to back.’ ‘I only played one,’ Troeltsch injects. ‘Had a measurable fever in the A.M., deLint said to throttle down today.’ ‘Folks that went three sets only played one match, Spodek and Kent for an instance,’ Stice says. ‘Funny how Troeltsch how his health always seems to rally when A.M. drills get out,’ Freer says. ‘— like conservatively two hours for the matches. Conservatively. Then half an hour on the machines under fucking Loach’s beady browns, sitting there with the clipboard. That’s let’s call it five hours of vigorous nonstop straight-out motion.’ ‘Sustained and strenuous exertion.’ ‘Schtitt’s determinated this year we ain’t singing no silly songs at Port Washington.’ John Wayne hasn’t said one word this whole time. The contents of his locker are neat and organized. He always buttons his shirt all the way up to the top button as if he were going to put on a tie, which he doesn’t even own. Ingersoll’s also getting dressed out of his underclassman’s small square locker.

Stice says ‘Except they seem to forget we’re still in our puberty.’ Ingersoll is a kid seemingly wholly devoid of eyebrows, as far as Hal

can see. ‘Speak for yourself, Darkness.’ ‘I’m saying how stressing the pubertyizing skeleton like this, it’s real short-sighted.’ Stice’s voice rises. ‘ ’m I supposed to do when I’m twenty and in the Show playing nonstop and I’m skeletally stressed and injury-

proned?’ ‘Dark’s right.’

A curled bit of cloudy old Pledge-husk and a green thread from a strip of GauzeTex wrap are complexly entwined in the blue fibers of the carpet near Hal’s left ankle, which ankle is faintly swollen and has a blue tinge. He keeps flexing the ankle whenever it occurs to him to. Struck and Troeltsch spar briefly with open hands, feinting and bobbing their heads, both still seated on the floor. Hal, Stice, Troeltsch, Struck, Rader, and Beak are all rhythmically squeezing tennis balls with their racquet-hands, as per Academy mandate. Struck’s shoulders and neck have furious purple inflammations; Hal had also noticed a boil on the inside of Schacht’s thigh, when Ted’d sat down. Hal’s face’s reflection just fits inside one of the wall- tiles opposite, and then if he moves his head slowly the face distends and comes back together with an optical twang in the next tile. That post- shower community feeling is dissipating. Even Evan Ingersoll looks quickly at his watch and clears his throat. Wayne and Shaw have dressed and left; Freer, a major Pledge-devotee, is at his hair in the mirror, Pemulis also rising now to get away from Freer’s feet and legs. Freer’s eyes have a protrusive wideness to them that the Axhandle says makes Freer always look like he’s getting shocked or throttled.

And time in the P.M. locker room seems of limitless depth; they’ve all been just here before, just like this, and will be again tomorrow. The light saddening outside, a grief felt in the bones, a sharpness to the edge of the lengthening shadows. ‘I’m thinking it’s Tavis,’ Freer says to them all in the mirror. ‘Where there’s excess work and suffering can fucking Tavis be far behind.’ ‘No, it’s Schtitt,’ Hal says. ‘Schtitt was short a few wickets out of the old croquet set long before he

got hold of us, men,’ Pemulis says.

‘Peemster and Hal.’ ‘Halation and Pemurama.’ Freer purses his little lips and expels air like he’s blowing out a match, blowing some tiny grooming-remnant off the big mirror’s glass. ‘Schtitt just does what he’s told like a good Nazi.’ ‘What the hail is that supposed to mean?’ asks a Stice who’s well known for asking How High Sir when Schtitt says Jump, now feeling at the carpet around him for something to throw at Freer. Ingersoll tosses Stice a woppsed-up towel, trying to be helpful, but Stice’s eyes are on Freer’s in

the glass, and the towel hits him on the head and sits there, on his head. The room’s emotions seem to be inverting themselves every couple seconds.

There’s half-cruel laughter at Stice as Hal struggles to his feet, rising in careful stages, putting most of his weight on the good ankle. Hal’s towel falls off as he does his combination. Struck says something that’s lost in the roar of a high-pressure toilet.

The feminized American stood at a slight angle to Marathe upon the outcropping. He stared out at the dusk-shadow they were now inside, and as well the increasingly complicated twinkle of the U.S.A. city Tucson, seeming slackly transfixed, Steeply, in the way vistas too large for the eye to contain transfix persons in a kind of torpid spectation.

Marathe seemed on the edge of sleep.

Even the voice of Steeply had a different timbre inside the shadow. ‘They say it’s a great and maybe even timeless love, Rod Tine’s for your Luria person.’ Marathe grunted, shifting slightly in the chair.

Steeply said ‘The sort that gets sung about, the kind people die for and then get immortalized in song. You got your ballads, your operas. Tristan and Isolde. Lancelot and what’s-her-name. Agamemnon and Helen, Dante and Beatrice.’ Marathe’s drowsy smile continued upward to become a wince. ‘Narcissus and Echo. Kierkegaard and Regina. Kafka and that poor girl afraid to go to the postbox for the mail.’ ‘Interesting choice of example here, the mailbox.’ Steeply pretended to chuckle.

Marathe came alert. ‘Take off your wig and be shitting inside it, Hugh Steeply B.S.S. And the ignorance of you appalls me. Agamemnon had no relation with this queen. Menelaus was husband, him of Sparta. And you mean Paris. Helen and Paris. He of Troy.’ Steeply seemed amused in the idiotic way: ‘Paris and Helen, the face that launched vessels. The horse: the gift which was not a gift. The anonymous gift brought to the door. The sack of Troy from inside.’ Marathe rose slightly on his stumps in the chair, showing some emotions at this Steeply. ‘I am seated here appalled at the naïveté of history of your nation. Paris and Helen were the excuse of the war. All the Greek states in

addition to the Sparta of Menelaus attacked Troy because Troy controlled the Dardanelles and charged the ruinous tolls for passage through, which the Greeks, who would like very dearly the easy sea passage for trade with the Oriental East, resented with fury. It was for commerce, this war. The one-quotes “love” one-does-not-quote of Paris for Helen merely was the excuse.’ Steeply, genius of interviewing, sometimes affected more than usual idiocy with Marathe, which he knew baited Marathe. ‘Everything reduces itself to politics for you guys. Wasn’t that whole war just a song? Did that war even really take place, that anybody knows of?’ ‘The point is that what launches vessels of war is the state and community and its interests,’ Marathe said without heat, tiredly. ‘You only wish to enjoy to pretend for yourself that the love of one woman could do this, launch so many vessels of alliance.’ Steeply was stroking the perimeters of the mesquite-scratch, which made his shrug appear awkward. ‘I don’t think I’d be so sure. Those around Rod the God say the man would die twice for her. Say he wouldn’t have to even think about it. Not just that he’d let the whole of O.N.A.N. come

down, if it came to that. But’d die.’ Marathe sniffed. ‘Twice.’ ‘Without even having to pause and think,’ Steeply said, stroking at his lip’s electrolysistic rash in a ruminative fashion. ‘It’s the reason most of us think he’s still there, why he’s still got President Gentle’s ear. Divided loyalties are one thing. But if he does it for love — well then you’ve got a kind of tragic element that transcends the political, wouldn’t you say?’ Steeply smiled broadly down at Marathe.

Marathe’s own sbetrayal of A.F.R.: for medical care for the conditions of his wife; for (Steeply might imagine to think) love of a person, a woman. ‘Tragic saying as if Rodney Tine of Nonspecificity were not responsible for choosing it, as the insane are not responsible,’ said Marathe quietly.

Steeply now was smiling even more broadly. ‘It has a kind of tragic quality, timeless, musical, that how could Gentle resist?’ Marathe’s tone now became derisive despite his legendary sangfroid in matters of technical interviews: ‘These sentiments from a person who allows them to place him in the field as an enormous girl with tits at the cock-eyed angle, now discoursing on tragic love.’

Steeply, impassive and slackly ruminative, picked at the lipstick of the corner of his mouth with a littlest finger, removing some grain of grit, gazing out from their shelf of stone. ‘But sure. The fanatically patriotic Wheelchair Assassins of southern Québec scorn this type of interpersonal sentiment between people.’ Looking now down at Marathe. ‘No? Even though it’s just this that has brought you Tine, yours for Luria to command, should it ever come to that?’ Marathe had settled back on his bottom in the chair. ‘Your U.S.A. word for fanatic, “fanatic,” do they teach you it comes from the Latin for “temple”? It is meaning, literally, “worshipper at the temple.” ’ ‘Oh Jesus now here we go again,’ Steeply said. ‘As, if you will give the permission, does this love you speak of, M.

Tine’s grand love. It means only the attachment. Tine is attached, fanatically. Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith.’ Steeply made motions of weary familiarity. ‘Herrrrrre we go.’ Marathe ignored this. ‘Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U.S.A. only pretend you do not know. Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. What you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen. Die for one person? This is a craziness.

Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie, go mad, have sickness, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you.’ ‘How are your wife and kids doing, up there, by the way?’ ‘You U.S.A.’s do not seem to believe you may each choose what to die for. Love of a woman, the sexual, it bends back in on the self, makes you narrow, maybe crazy. Choose with care. Love of your nation, your country and people, it enlarges the heart. Something bigger than the self.’ Steeply laid a hand between his misdirected breasts: ‘Ohh… Canada….’ Marathe leaned again forward on his stumps. ‘Make amusement all you wish. But choose with care. You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice. You, M. Hugh Steeply: you would die without thinking for what?’ The A.F.R.’s extensive file on Steeply included mention of his recent divorce. Marathe already had informed Steeply of the existence of this file.

He wondered how badly Steeply doubted what he reported, Marathe, or whether he assumed its truth simply. Though the persona of him changed, Steeply’s car for all field assignments was this green sedan subsidized by a painful ad for aspirin upon its side — the file knew this stupidity — Marathe was sure the sedan with its aspirin advertisement was somewhere below them, unseen. The fanatically beloved car of M. Hugh Steeply.

Steeply was watching or gazing at the darkness of the desert floor. He did not respond. His expression of boredom could be real or tactical, either of these.

Marathe said, ‘This, is it not the choice of the most supreme importance? Who teaches your U.S.A. children how to choose their temple?

What to love enough not to think two times?’ ‘This from a man who —’ Marathe was willing that his voice not rise. ‘For this choice determines all else. No? All other of our you say free choices follow from this: what is our temple. What is the temple, thus, for U.S.A.’s? What is it, when you fear that you must protect them from themselves, if wicked Québecers conspire to bring the Entertainment into their warm homes?’ Steeply’s face had assumed the openly twisted sneering expression which he knew well Québecers found repellent on Americans. ‘But you assume it’s always choice, conscious, decision. This isn’t just a little naïve, Rémy? You sit down with your little accountant’s ledger and soberly decide

what to love? Always?’ ‘The alternatives are —’ ‘What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love? without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love?’ Marathe’s sniff held disdain. ‘Then in such a case your temple is self and sentiment. Then in such an instance you are a fanatic of desire, a slave to your individual subjective narrow self’s sentiments; a citizen of nothing.

You become a citizen of nothing. You are by yourself and alone, kneeling to

yourself.’ A silence ensued this.

Marathe shifted in his chair. ‘In a case such as this you become the slave who believes he is free. The most pathetic of bondage. Not tragic. No

songs. You believe you would die twice for another but in truth would die only for your alone self, its sentiment.’ Another silence ensued. Steeply, who had made his early career with 44 Unspecified Services conducting technical interviews, used silent pauses as integral parts of his techniques of interface. Here it defused Marathe.

Marathe felt the ironies of his position. One strap of Steeply’s prostheses’ brassiere had slipped into view below his shoulder, where it cut deeply into his flesh of the upper arm. The air smelled faintly of creosote, but much less strongly smelling than the ties of train tracks, which Marathe had smelled at close range. Steeply’s back was broad and soft. Marathe eventually said: ‘You in such a case have nothing. You stand on nothing. Nothing of ground or rock beneath your feet. You fall; you blow here and there. How does one say: “tragically, unvoluntarily, lost.” ’ Another silence ensued. Steeply farted mildly. Marathe shrugged. The B.S.S. Field Operative Steeply may not have been truly sneering. The city Tucson’s lume appeared a bleached and ghostly white in the unhumid air.

Crepuscular animals rustled and perhaps scuttled. Dense and unbeautiful spider webs of the poisonous U.S.A. species of spider Black Widow were beneath the shelf and the incline’s other outcroppings. And when the wind hit certain angles in the mountainside it moaned. Marathe thought of his 45 victory over the train that had taken his legs. He attempted in English to

sing: ‘ “Oh Say, Land of the Free.”’ And they both could feel this queer dry night-desert chill descend with the moon’s gibbous rise — a powdery wind down below making dust to shift and cactus needles whistle, the sky’s stars adjusting to the color of low flame — but were themselves not yet chilled, even Steeply’s sleeveless dress: he and Marathe stood and sat in the form-fitting astral spacesuit of warmth their own radiant heat produced. This is what happens in dry night climes, Marathe was learning. His dying wife had never once left southwestern Québec. Les Assassins des Fauteuils Roulents’ remote embryonic disseminatory Ops base down here in Southwest U.S.A. seemed to him like the surface of the moon: four corrugated Quonsets and kiln- baked earth and air that swam and shimmered like the area behind jet

engines. Empty and dirty-windowed rooms, doorknobs hot to touch and hell-stench inside the empty rooms.

Steeply was continuing saying nothing while he tamped down another of his long Belgian cigarettes. Marathe continued to hum the U.S.A. song, all over the map in terms of key.

3 NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U.

‘Because none of them really meant any of it,’ Hal tells Kent Blott. ‘The end-of-the-day hatred of all the work is just part of the work. You think Schtitt and deLint don’t know we’re going to sit in there together after showers and bitch? It’s all planned out. The bitchers and moaners in there are just doing what’s expected.’ ‘But I look at these guys that’ve been here six, seven years, eight years, still suffering, hurt, beat up, so tired, just like I feel tired and suffer, I feel this what, dread, this dread, I see seven or eight years of unhappiness every day and day after day of tiredness and stress and suffering stretching ahead, and for what, for a chance at a like a pro career that I’m starting to get this dready feeling a career in the Show means even more suffering, if I’m skeletally stressed from all the grueling here by the time I get there.’ Blott’s on his back on the shag carpet — all five of them are — stretched out splay-limbed with their heads up supported on double-width velourish throw-pillows on the floor of V.R.6, one of the three little Viewing Rooms on the second floor of the Comm.-Ad. Bldg., two flights up from the locker rooms and three from the main tunnel’s mouth. The room’s new cartridge- viewer is huge and almost painfully high-definition; it hangs flat on the north wall like a large painting; it runs off a refrigerated chip; the room’s got no TP or phone-console; it’s very specialized, just a player and viewer, and tapes; the cartridge-player sits on the second shelf of a small bookcase beneath the viewer; the other shelves and several other cases are full of match-cartridges, motivational and visualization cartridges — InterLace, Tatsuoka, Yushityu, SyberVision. The 300-track wire from the cartridge- player up to the lower-right corner of the wall-hung viewer is so thin it looks like a crack in the wall’s white paint. Viewing Rooms are windowless

and the air from the vent is stale. Though when the viewer’s on it looks like the room has a window.

Hal’s put on an undemanding visualization-type cartridge, as he usually does for a Big Buddy group-interface when they’re all tired. He’s killed the volume, so you can’t hear the reinforcing mantra, but the picture is bright and bell-clear. It’s like the picture almost leaps out at you. A graying and somewhat ravaged-looking Stan Smith in anachronistic white is at a court’s baseline hitting textbook forehands, over and over again, the same stroke, his back sort of osteoporotically hunched but his form immaculate, his foot- work textbook and effortless — the frictionless pivot and back-set of weight, the anachronistic Wilson wood stick back and pointing straight to the fence behind him, the fluid transfer of weight to the front foot as the ball comes in, the contact at waist-level and just out front, the front leg’s muscles bunching up as the back leg’s settle, eyes glued to the yellow ball in the center of his strings’ stencilled W — E.T.A. kids are conditioned to watch not just the ball but the ball’s rotating seams, to read the spin coming in — the front knee dipping slightly down under bulging quads as the weight flows more forward, the back foot up almost en-pointe on the gleaming sneaker’s unscuffed toe, the no-nonsense flourishless follow- through so the stick ends up just in front of his gaunt face — Smith’s cheeks have hollowed as he’s aged, his face has collapsed at the sides, his eyes seem to bulge from the cheekbones that protrude as he inhales after impact, he looks desiccated, aged in hot light, performing the same motions over and over, for decades, his other hand floating up gently to grasp the stick’s throat out in front of the face so he’s flowed back into the Ready Stance all over again. No wasted motion, egoless strokes, no flourishes or tics or excesses of wrist. Over and over, each forehand melting into the next, a loop, it’s hypnotizing, it’s supposed to be. The soundtrack says ‘Don’t Think Just See Don’t Know Just Flow’ over and over, if you turn it up.

You’re supposed to pretend it’s you on the bell-clear screen with the fluid and egoless strokes. You’re supposed to disappear into the loop and then carry that disappearance out with you, to play. The kids’re lying there limp and splayed, supine, jaws slack, eyes wide and dim, a relaxed exhausted warmth — the flooring beneath the shag is gently heated. Peter Beak is asleep with his eyes open, a queer talent E.T.A. seems to instill in the

younger ones. Orin had been able to sleep with his eyes open at the dinner table, too, at home.

Hal’s fingers, long and light brown and still slightly sticky from tincture 46 of benzoin, are laced behind his upraised head on the pillow, cupping his own skull, watching Stan Smith, eyes heavy too. ‘You feel as though you’ll be going through the exact same sort of suffering at seventeen you suffer now, here, Kent?’ Kent Blott has colored shoelaces on his sneakers with ‘Mr.-Bouncety- Bounce-Program’-brand bow-biters, which Hal finds extraordinarily artless and young.

Peter Beak snores softly, a small spit-bubble protruding and receding. ‘But Blott surely you’ve considered this: Why are they all still here, then, if it’s so awful every day?’ ‘Not every day,’ Blott says. ‘But pretty often it’s awful.’ ‘They’re here because they want the Show when they get out,’ Ingersoll sniffs and says. The Show meaning the A.T.P. Tour, travel and cash prizes and endorsements and appearance fees, match-highlights in video mags, action photos in glossy print-mags. ‘But they know and we know one very top junior in twenty even gets all the way to the Show. Much less survives there long. The rest slog around on the satellite tours or regional tours or get soft as club pros. Or become lawyers or academics like everyone else,’ Hal says softly. ‘Then they stay and suffer to get a scholarship. A college ride. A white cardigan with a letter. Girl coeds keen on lettermen.’ ‘Kent, except for Wayne and Pemulis not one guy in there needs any kind of scholarship. Pemulis’ll get a full ride anywhere he wants, just on test-scores. Stice’s aunts’ll send him anywhere even if he doesn’t want to play. And Wayne’s headed for the Show, he’ll never do more than a year in the O.N.A.N.C.A.A.’s.’ Blott’s father, a cutting-edge E.N.T. oncologist, flew all over the world removing tumors from wealthy mucous membranes; Blott has a trust fund. ‘None of that’s the point and you guys know it.’ ‘They love the game, you’re going to say.’ Stan Smith has switched to backhands. ‘They sure must love something, Ingersoll, but how about for a second I say that’s not Kent’s point either. Kent’s point’s the misery in that room just

now. K.B., I’ve taken part in essentially that same bitter bitchy kind of session hundreds of times with those same guys after bad P.M.s. In the showers, in the sauna, at dinner.’ ‘Very much bitching also in the lavatories,’ Arslanian says.

Hal unsticks his hair from his fingers. Arslanian always has a queer faint hot-doggish smell about him. ‘The point is it’s ritualistic. The bitching and moaning. Even assuming they feel the way they say when they get together, the point is notice we were all sitting there all feeling the same way

together.’ ‘The point is togetherness?’ ‘Shouldn’t there be violas for this part, Hal, if this is the point?’ ‘Ingersoll, I — ’ Beak’s cold-weather adenoids wake him periodically, and he gurgles and his eyes roll up briefly before they level out and he settles back, seeming to stare.

Hal creatively visualizes that Smith’s velvety backhand is him slo-mo slapping Evan Ingersoll into the opposite wall. Ingersoll’s parents founded the Rhode Island version of the service where you order groceries by TP and teenagers in fleets of station wagons bring them out to you, instead of supermarkets. ‘What the point is is that we’d all just spent three hours playing challenges against each other in scrotum-tightening cold, assailing each other, trying to take away each other’s spots on the squads. Trying to defend them against each other’s assaults. The system’s got inequality as an axiom. We know where we stand entirely in relation to one another. John Wayne’s over me, and I’m over Struck and Shaw, who two years back were both over me but under Troeltsch and Schacht, and now are over Troeltsch who as of today is over Freer who’s substantially over Schacht, who can’t beat anyone in the room except Pemulis since his knee and Crohn’s Disease got so much worse, and is barely hanging on in terms of ranking, and is showing incredible balls just hanging on. Freer beat me 4 and 2 in the quarters of the U.S. Clays two summers ago, and now he’s on the B-squad and five slots below me, six slots if Troeltsch can still beat him when they play again after that illness-default.’ ‘I am over Blott. I am over Ingersoll,’ Idris Arslanian nods. ‘Well Blott’s just ten, Idris. And you’re under Chu, who’s on an odd year and is under Possalthwaite. And Blott’s under Beak and Ingersoll simply by

virtue of age-division.’ ‘I know just where I stand at all times,’ muses Ingersoll.

SyberVision edits its visualization sequences with a melt-filter so Stan Smith’s follow-through loops seamlessly into his backswing for the exact same next stroke; the transitions are gauzy and dreamlike. Hal struggles to hike himself up onto his elbows: ‘We’re all on each other’s food chain. All of us. It’s an individual sport.

Welcome to the meaning of individual. We’re each deeply alone here. It’s what we all have in common, this aloneness.’ ‘E Unibus Pluram,’ Ingersoll muses.

Hal looks from face to face. Ingersoll’s face is completely devoid of eyebrows and is round and dustily freckled, not unlike a Mrs. Clarke pancake. ‘So how can we also be together? How can we be friends? How can Ingersoll root for Arslanian in Idris’s singles at the Port Washington thing when if Idris loses Ingersoll gets to challenge for his spot again?’ ‘I do not require his root, for I am ready.’ Arslanian bares canines. ‘Well that’s the whole point. How can we be friends? Even if we all live and eat and shower and play together, how can we keep from being 136 deeply alone people all jammed together?’ ‘You’re talking about community. This is a community-spiel.’ ‘I think alienation,’ Arslanian says, rolling the profile over to signify he’s talking to Ingersoll. ‘Existential individuality, frequently referred to in the West. Solipsism.’ His upper lip goes up and down over his teeth.

Hal says, ‘In a nutshell, what we’re talking about here is loneliness.’ Blott looks about ready to cry. Beak’s palsied eyes and little limb- spasms signify a troubling dream. Blott rubs his nose furiously with the heel

of his hand. ‘I miss my dog,’ Ingersoll concedes. ‘Ah.’ Hal rolls onto one elbow to hike a finger into the air. ‘Ah. But then so notice the instant group-cohesion that formed itself around all the pissing and moaning down there why don’t you. Blott. You, Kent. This was your question. The what looks like sadism, the skeletal stress, the fatigue. The suffering unites us. They want to let us sit around and bitch. Together. After a bad P.M. set we all, however briefly, get to feel we have a common enemy. This is their gift to us. Their medicine. Nothing brings you together like a common enemy.’

‘Mr. deLint.’ ‘Dr. Tavis. Schtitt.’ ‘DeLint. Watson. Nwangi. Thode. All Schtitt’s henchmen and

henchwomen.’ ‘I hate them!’ Blott cries out. ‘And you’ve been here this long and you still think this hatred’s an accident?’ ‘Purchase a clue Kent Blott!’ Arslanian says. ‘The large and economy-size clue, Blott,’ Ingersoll chimes.

Beak sits up and says ‘God no not with pliers!’ and collapses back again, again with the spit-bubble.

Hal is pretending incredulity. ‘You guys haven’t noticed yet the way Schtitt’s whole staff gets progressively more foul-tempered and sadistic as an important competitive week comes up?’ Ingersoll up on one elbow at Blott. ‘The Port Washington meet. I.D.

Day. The Tucson WhataBurger the week after. They want us in absolute top shape, Blott.’ Hal lies back and lets Smith’s ballet de se loosen his facial muscles again, staring. ‘Shit, Ingersoll, we’re all in top shape already. That’s not it.

That’s the least of it. We’re off the charts, shape-wise.’ Ingersoll: ‘The average North American kid can’t even do one pull-up, according to Nwangi.’ Arslanian points down at his own chest. ‘Twenty-eight pull-ups.’ ‘The point,’ Hal says softly, ‘is that it’s not about the physical anymore, men. The physical stuff’s just pro forma. It’s the heads they’re working on here, boys. Day and year in and out. A whole program. It’ll help your attitude to look for evidence of design. They always give us something to hate, really hate together, as big stuff looms. The dreaded May drills during finals before the summer tour. The post-Christmas crackdown before Australia. The November freezathon, the snot-fest, the delay in upping the Lung and getting us under cover. A common enemy. I may despise K. B.

Freer, or’ (can’t quite resist) ‘Evan Ingersoll, or Jennie Bash. But we despise Schtitt’s men, the double matches on top of runs, the insensitivity to exams, the repetition, the stress. The loneliness. But we get together and bitch, all of a sudden we’re giving something group expression. A community voice. Community, Evan. Oh they’re cunning. They give

themselves up to our dislike, calculate our breaking points and aim for just over them, then send us into the locker room with an unstructured forty-five before Big Buddy sessions. Accident? Random happenstance? You guys ever see evidence of the tiniest lack of coolly calculated structure around here?’ ‘The structure’s what I hate the most of all,’ Ingersoll says. ‘They know what’s going on,’ Blott says, bouncing a little on his tailbone. ‘They want us to get together and complain.’ ‘Oh they’re cunning,’ Ingersoll says.

Hal curls himself a bit on one elbow to put in a small plug of Kodiak. He can’t tell whether Ingersoll’s being insolent. He lies there very slack, visualizing Smith pounding overheads down onto Ingersoll’s skull. Hal some weeks back had acquiesced to Lyle’s diagnosis that Hal finds Ingersoll — this smart soft caustic kid, with a big soft eyebrowless face and unwrinkled thumb-joints, with the runty, cuddled look of a Mama’s boy from way back, a quick intelligence he squanders on an insatiable need to advance some impression of himself — that the kid so repels Hal because Hal sees in the kid certain parts of himself he can’t or won’t accept. None of this ever occurs to Hal when Ingersoll’s in the room. He wishes him ill.

Blott and Arslanian are looking at him. ‘Are you OK?’ ‘He is tired,’ Arslanian says.

Ingersoll drums idly on his own ribcage.

Hal usually gets secretly high so regularly these days this year that if by dinnertime he hasn’t gotten high yet that day his mouth begins to fill with spit — some rebound effect from B. Hope’s desiccating action — and his eyes start to water as if he’s just yawned. The smokeless tobacco started almost as an excuse to spit, sometimes. Hal’s struck by the fact that he really for the most part believes what he’s said about loneliness and the structured need for a we here; and this, together with the Ingersoll-repulsion and spit-flood, makes him uncomfortable again, brooding uncomfortably for a moment on why he gets off on the secrecy of getting high in secret more than on the getting high itself, possibly. He always gets the feeling there’s some clue to it on the tip of his tongue, some mute and inaccessible part of the cortex, and then he always feels vaguely sick, scanning for it.

The other thing that happens if he doesn’t do one-hitters sometime before dinner is he feels slightly sick to his stomach, and it’s hard to eat enough at

dinner, and then later when he does go off and get off he gets ravenous, and goes out to Father & Son Market for candy, or else floods his eyes with Murine and heads down to the Headmaster’s House for another late dinner with C.T. and the Moms, and eats like such a feral animal that the Moms says it does something instinctively maternal in her heart good to see him pack it away, but then he wakes before dawn with awful indigestion. ‘So the suffering gets less lonely,’ Blott prompts him.

Two curves down the hall in V.R.5, where the viewer’s on the south wall and doesn’t get turned on, the Canadian John Wayne’s got LaMont Chu and ‘Sleepy T.P.’ Peterson and Kieran McKenna and Brian van Vleck. ‘He’s talking about developing the concept of tennis mastery,’ Chu tells the other three. They’re on the floor Indian-style, Wayne standing with his back against the door, rotating his head to stretch the neck. ‘His point is that progress towards genuine Show-caliber mastery is slow, frustrating.

Humbling. A question of less talent than temperament.’ ‘Is this right Mr. Wayne?’ Chu says ‘… that because you proceed toward mastery through a series of plateaus, so there’s like radical improvement up to a certain plateau and then what looks like a stall, on the plateau, with the only way to get off one of the plateaus and climb up to the next one up ahead is with a whole lot of frustrating mindless repetitive practice and patience and hanging in there.’ ‘Plateaux,’ Wayne says, looking at the ceiling and pushing the back of his head isometrically against the door. ‘With an X. Plateaux.’ The inactive viewer’s screen is the color of way out over the Atlantic looking straight down on a cold day. Chu’s cross-legged posture is text- book. ‘What John’s saying is the types who don’t hang in there and slog on the patient road toward mastery are basically three. Types. You’ve got what he calls your Despairing type, who’s fine as long as he’s in the quick- improvement stage before a plateau, but then he hits a plateau and sees himself seem to stall, not getting better as fast or even seeming to get a little worse, and this type gives in to frustration and despair, because he hasn’t got the humbleness and patience to hang in there and slog, and he can’t stand the time he has to put in on plateaux, and what happens?’ ‘Geronimo!’ the other kids yell, not quite in sync. ‘He bails, right,’ Chu says. He refers to index cards. Wayne’s head makes the door rattle slightly. Chu says, ‘Then you’ve got your Obsessive

type, J.W. says, so eager to plateau-hop he doesn’t even know the word patient, much less humble or slog, when he gets stalled at a plateau he tries to like will and force himself off it, by sheer force of work and drill and will and practice, drilling and obsessively honing and working more and more, as in frantically, and he overdoes it and gets hurt, and pretty soon he’s all chronically messed up with injuries, and he hobbles around on the court still obsessively overworking, until finally he’s hardly even able to walk or swing, and his ranking plummets, until finally one P.M. there’s a little knock on his door and it’s deLint, here for a little chat about your progress

here at E.T.A.’ ‘Banzai! El Bailo! See ya!’ ‘Then what John considers maybe the worst type, because it can cunningly masquerade as patience and humble frustration. You’ve got the Complacent type, who improves radically until he hits a plateau, and is content with the radical improvement he’s made to get to the plateau, and doesn’t mind staying at the plateau because it’s comfortable and familiar, and he doesn’t worry about getting off it, and pretty soon you find he’s designed a whole game around compensating for the weaknesses and chinks in the armor the given plateau represents in his game, still — his whole game is based on this plateau now. And little by little, guys he used to beat start beating him, locating the chinks of the plateau, and his rank starts to slide, but he’ll say he doesn’t care, he says he’s in it for the love of the game, and he always smiles but there gets to be something sort of tight and hangdog about his smile, and he always smiles and is real nice to everybody and real good to have around but he keeps staying where he is while other guys hop plateaux, and he gets beat more and more, but he’s content. Until one day there’s a quiet knock at the door.’

‘It’s DeLint!’

‘A quiet chat!’ ‘Geronzai!’ Van Vleck looks up at Wayne, who’s now turned away with his hands against the door frame, shoving, one leg back, stretching the right calf. ‘This is your advice, Mr. Wayne sir? This isn’t Chu palming himself off as you again?’ They all want to know how Wayne does it, #2 continentally in 18’s at just seventeen, and very likely #1 after the WhataBurger and already getting

calls from ProServ agents Tavis has Lateral Alice Moore screen. Wayne’s the most sought-after Big Buddy at E.T.A. You have to apply for Wayne as Buddy by random drawing.

LaMont Chu and T. P. Peterson are sending van Vleck optical daggers as Wayne turns around to stretch a hip-flexor and says he’s said pretty much all he has to say. ‘Todder, I admire your savvy, I admire a kid’s certain worldly skepticism, no matter how misplaced it is here. So even though it fucks me on the odds, so there’s now like practically no way I can come out square,’ M. Pemulis says in V.R.2, subdorm C, sitting on the very edge of the divan with a few feet of beige shag between him and his four kids, all cross- legged on cushions; he says, ‘I’ll reward your worldly skepticism this once by letting you try it with only two, so like I’ve got just two cards here, and I hold them up, one in each hand….’ He stops abruptly, knocks his temple with the heel of a hand that holds a Jack. ‘Whoa, what am I thinking. We all gotta put in our fiveski here first.’ Otis P. Lord clears his throat: ‘The ante.’ ‘Or it’s called the pot,’ says Todd Possalthwaite, laying a five on the little pile. ‘Jaysus I’m thinking, sweet Jaysus what am I getting into with these kids that speak the lingo like veteran Jersey-shore croupiers. I got to be missing a widget or something. ’t the fuck, though, you know what I’m saying? So Todd man you choose just one of the cards, we got the clubby Jack and the spade Queen here, and you choose… and so down they go both of them face-down, and I like swirl them around on the floor a little, not shuffle but swirl so they’re in plain view the whole time, and you follllllowwwwwwww the card you chose, around and around, which like with three cards maybe I’ve got some chance you lose track but with two?

With just two?’ Ted Schacht in V.R.3 at his giant plasticene oral demonstrator, the huge dental mock-up, white planks of teeth and obscene pink gums, twine-size floss anchored around both wrists: ‘The vital thing here gentlemen being not the force or how often you rotate to particulate-free floss but the motion, see, a soft sawing motion, gently up and down both ancipitals of the enamel’ — demonstrating down the side of a bicuspid big as the kids’ heads, the plasticene gum-stuff

yielding with sick sucking sounds, Schacht’s five kids all either glazed- looking or glued to their watch’s second-hand — ‘and then here’s the key, here’s the thing so few people understand: down below the ostensible gumline into the basal recessions at either side of the gingival mound that obtrudes between the teeth, down below, where your most pernicious particulates hide and breed.’ Troeltsch holds court in his, Pemulis and Schacht’s room in Subdorm C, supinely upright against both of his and one of Schacht’s pillows, the vaporizer chugging, one of his kids holding Kleenex at the ready. ‘Boys, what it is is I’ll tell you it’s repetition. First last always. It’s hearing the same motivational stuff over and over till sheer repetitive weight makes it sink down into the gut. It’s making the same pivots and lunges and strokes over and over and over again, at you boys’s age it’s reps for their own sake, putting results on the back burner, why they never give anybody the boot for insufficient progress under fourteen, it’s repetitive movements and motions for their own sake, over and over until the accretive weight of the reps sinks the movements themselves down under your like consciousness into the more nether regions, through repetition they sink and soak into the hardware, the C.P.S. The machine-language. The autonomical part that makes you breathe and sweat. It’s no accident they say you Eat, Sleep, Breathe tennis here. These are autonomical. Accretive means accumulating, through sheer mindless repeated motions. The machine-language of the muscles. Until you can do it without thinking about it, play. At like fourteen, give and take, they figure here. Just do it.

Forget about is there a point, of course there’s no point. The point of repetition is there is no point. Wait until it soaks into the hardware and then see the way this frees up your head. A whole shitload of head-space you don’t need for the mechanics anymore, after they’ve sunk in. Now the mechanics are wired in. Hardwired in. This frees the head in the remarkablest ways. Just wait. You start thinking a whole different way now, playing. The court might as well be inside you. The ball stops being a ball.

The ball starts being something that you just know ought to be in the air, spinning. This is when they start getting on you about concentration. Right now of course you have to concentrate, there’s no choice, it’s not wired down into the language yet, you have to think about it every time you do it.

But wait till fourteen or fifteen. Then they see you as being at one of the

like crucial plateaus. Fifteen, tops. Then the concentration and character shit starts. Then they really come after you. This is the crucial plateau where character starts to matter. Focus, self-consciousness, the chattering head, the cackling voices, the choking-issue, fear versus whatever isn’t fear, self- image, doubts, reluctances, little tight-lipped cold-footed men inside your mind, cackling about fear and doubt, chinks in the mental armor. Now these start to matter. Thirteen at the earliest. Staff looks at a range of thirteen to fifteen. Also the age of manhood-rituals in various cultures. Think about it.

Until then, repetition. Until then you might as well be machines, here, is their view. You’re just going through the motions. Think about the phrase: Going Through The Motions. Wiring them into the motherboard. You guys don’t know how good you’ve got it right now.’ James Albrecht Lockley Struck Jr. of Orinda CA prefers one long Q&A- type interface, with V.R.8’s viewer playing ambient stuff against relaxation- vistas of surf, shimmering ponds, fields of nodding wheat. ‘Time for about maybe two more, me droogies.’ ‘Say it’s close and the guy starts kertwanging you. Balls are way in and he’s calling them out. You can’t believe the flagrancy of it.’ ‘Implicit this is a no-linesman situation, Traub, you’re saying.’ Creepily-blue-eyed Audern Tallat-Kelpsa chimes in: ‘This is early rounds. The kind they give you only two balls. Honor systems. All of a sudden there he is kertwanging on you. It happens.’ ‘I know it happens.’ Traub says, ‘Whether he’s outright kertwanging or just head-fucking you. Do you start kertwanging back? Tit for tat? What do you do?’ ‘Do we assume there’s a crowd.’ ‘Early round. Remote court. No witnesses. You’re on your own out there. Do you kertwang back.’ ‘You do not kertwang back. You play the calls, not a word, keep smiling.

If you still win, you’ll have grown inside as a person.’ ‘If you lose?’ ‘If you lose, you do something private and unpleasant to his water-jug right before his next round.’ A couple of the kids have notebooks and studious nods. Struck is a prized tactician, very formal in B.B. group-sessions, something scholarly and detached about him his charges often revere.

‘We can discuss private water-jug unpleasantness on Friday,’ Struck says, looking at his watch.

A hand raised by the violently cross-eyed Carl Whale, age thirteen.

Acknowledgment from Struck.

‘Say you have to fart.’ ‘You’re serious, Mobes, aren’t you.’ ‘Jim sir, say you’re playing out there, and suddenly you have to fart. It feels like one of those real hot nasty pressurized ones.’ ‘I get the picture.’ Now some empathic murmurs, exchanged looks. Josh Gopnik is nodding very intensely. Struck stands very straight to the right of the viewer, hands behind his back like an Oxford don. ‘I mean the kind that’s real urgent.’ Whale looks briefly around him. ‘But that it’s not impossible it’s actually a need to go to the bathroom, instead, masquerading as a fart.’ Now five heads are nodding, pained, urgent: clearly a vexing sub-14 issue. Struck examines a cuticle. ‘Meaning defecate is what you mean, then, Mobes. Go to the bathroom.’ Gopnik looks up. ‘Carl’s saying the kind where you don’t know what to do. What if you think you have to fart but it’s really that you have to shit?’ ‘As in it’s a competitive situation, it’s not a situation where you can go bearing down and forcing and see what happens.’ ‘So out of caution you don’t,’ Gopnik says. ‘— fart,’ Philip Traub says. ‘But then you’ve denied yourself an urgent fart, and you’re running around trying to compete with a terrible hot nasty uncomfortable fart riding around the court inside you.’ Two levels down, Ortho Stice and his brood: the little libraryish circle of soft chairs and lamps in the warm foyer off the front door to subdorm C: ‘And what he says he says it’s about more than tennis, mein kinder.

Mein kinder, well it sort of means my family. He eyeballs me right square in the eye and says it’s about how to reach down into parts of yourself you didn’t know were there and get down in there and live inside these parts.

And the only way to get to them: sacrifice. Suffer. Deny. What are you willing to give. You’ll hear him ask it if you’re privileged to ever get an interface. The call could come at anytime: the man wants a mano-to-mano

interface. You’ll hear him say it over and over. What have you got to give.

What are you willing to part with. I see you’re looking a little pale there, Wagenknecht. Is this scary you bet your little pink personal asses it’s scary.

It’s the big time. He’ll tell you straight the fuck out. It’s about discipline and sacrifice and honor to something way bigger than your personal ass. He’ll mention America. He’ll talk patriotism and don’t think he won’t. He’ll talk about it’s patriotic play that’s the high road to the thing. He’s not American but I tell you straight out right here he makes me proud to be American.

Mein kinder. He’ll say it’s how to learn to be a good American during a time, boys, when America isn’t good its own self.’ There’s a long pause. The front door is newer than the wood around it. ‘I’d chew fiberglass for that old man.’ The only reason the Buddies in V.R.8 can hear the little burst of applause from the foyer is because Struck won’t hesitate to pause and consider silently as long as he has to. To the kids the pauses spell dignity and integrity and the still-water depth of a guy with nine years in at three different academies, and who has to shave daily. He exhales a slow breath through rounded lips, looking off up at the ceiling’s guilloche border.

‘Mobes, if it’s me: I let it ride.’ ‘You let it out come what may?’ ‘A la contraire. I let it ride around inside all day if I have to. I make an iron rule: nothing escapes my bottom during play. Not a toot or a whistle. If I play hunched over I play hunched over. I take the discomfort in the name of dignified caution, and when it’s especially bad I look up at sky between points and I say to the sky Thank You Sir may I have another. Thank You Sir may I have another.’ Gopnik and Tallat-Kelpsa are writing this down.

Struck says, ‘That’s if I want to hang for the long haul.’ ‘One side of the gingival mound, then up over the apex and down over the other side of the gingival mound, using you should cultivate a certain amount of touch with the string.’ ‘Now the big question of character is do we let a fluke of a probably one-in-a-hundred lapse in concentration make us throw up our faggy hands and go dragging characterlessly back to our dens to lick the whimpering wounds, or do we narrow our eyes and put out the chin and say Pemulis we

say we say Pemulis, Double or Nothing, when the odds remain so almost crazily stacked in our favor today.’ ‘So they do it on purpose?’ Beak is asking. ‘Try to make us hate them?’ Limits and rituals. It’s almost time for communal dinner. Sometimes Mrs. Clarke in the kitchen lets Mario ring a triangle with a steel ladle while she rolls back the dining-room doors. They make the servers wear hairnets and little Ob/Gynish gloves. Hal could take out the plug and nip down into the tunnels, maybe not even all the way down into the Pump Room. Be only twenty minutes late. He’s thinking in an abstract absent way about limits and rituals, listening to Blott give Beak his aperçu. Like as in is there a clear line, a quantifiable difference between need and just strong desire. He has to sit up to spit in the wastebasket. There is a twinge in a tooth on his mouth’s left side.

MARIO INCANDENZA’S FIRST AND ONLY EVEN REMOTELY ROMANTIC EXPERIENCE, THUS FAR

In mid-October Y.D.A.U., Hal had invited Mario for a post-prandial stroll, and they were strolling the E.T.A. grounds between the West Courts and the hillside’s tree-line, Hal with his gear bag. Mario could sense that Hal wanted to be able to go off by himself briefly, so he contrived (Mario did) to be very interested in some sort of leaf-and-twig ensemble off the path, and let Hal sort of melt away down the path. The whole area running along the tree-line and the thickets of like shrubbery and stickery bushes and heaven knew what all was covered with fallen leaves that were dry but had not yet quite all the way lost their color. The leaves were underfoot.

Mario kind of tottered from tree to tree, pausing at each tree to rest. It was @ 1900h., not yet true twilight, but the only thing left of the sunset was a snout just over Newton, and the places under long shadows were cold, and a certain kind of melancholy sadness was insinuating itself into the grounds’ light. The staggered lamps by the paths hadn’t come on yet, however.

A lovely scent of illegally burned leaves wafting up from East Newton mixed with the foody smells from the ventilator turbines out of the back of the dining hall. Two gulls were in one place in the air over the dumpsters over by the rear parking lot. Leaves crackled underfoot. The sound of Mario

walking in dry leaves was like: crackle crackle crackle stop; crackle crackle crackle stop.

An Empire Waste Displacement displacement vehicle whistled past overhead, rising in the start of its arc, its one blue alert-light atwinkle.

He was around where the tree-line bulged herniatically out toward the end of the West Courts’ fencing. From deeper inside the thickets on the lip of the hillside came a tremendous crackling and thrashing of underbrush and trailing willow-branches, and who should heave into unexpected view but the U.S.S. Millicent Kent, a sixteen-year-old out of Montclair NJ, #1 Singles on the Girls 16’s-A squad and two hundred kilos if she was a kilo.

Southpaw, one-hander off the backhand side, a serve Donnie Stott likes to clock with radar, and chart. Mario’s filmed the U.S.S. Millicent Kent for staff-analysis on several occasions. They exchange hearty Hi’s. One of only a couple female E.T.A.s with visible veins in her forearms, object of a fiercely-wagered-on bench-press challenge against Schacht, Freer, and Petropolis Kahn that M. Pemulis had organized last spring, in which she’d topped Kahn and Freer refused to show and Schacht finally beat her but doffed his cap. Out for a staff-ordered weight-management post-dinner stroll, squeezing Penn 5’s in both hands, in E.T.A. sweat pants and with an enormous violet bow either Scotch-taped or glued to the blunt rounded top of her hair. She told Mario she’d just seen the strangest thing farther back deeper in the thickets off the lip. Her hair was tall and rounded off in the shape of a kind of pill, not unlike a papal hat or a British constable’s tall hat. Mario said the bow looked terrific, and what a surprise to come face to face like this out here in the chill dusk. Bridget Boone had said the U.S.S.

Millicent Kent’s coiffure looked like a missile protruding from its silo in preparation for launch. The last of the sun’s snout was setting just over the tip of the U.S.S. Millicent’s hair, which was almost osseously hard-looking, composed of dense woven nests of reticulate fibers like a dry loofa sponge, which she said over the summer a home-perm had misfired and left her hair a system of reticulate nests, and was only now loosening up enough even to attach a bow to. Mario said that well the bow set her off to a T, was all he had to say on the matter. (He hadn’t literally said ‘chill dusk.’) The U.S.S.M.K. said she’d been amusing herself beating her way through one of the brambly thickets Mrs. Incandenza had — when she’d still spent time outdoors at all — planted to discourage part-time employees from short-

cutting up the hillside to E.T.A., and had come upon a Husky VI-brand telescoping tripod, new and dully silvery-looking and set up on its three legs, right in the middle of the thicket. For no visible reason and with no footprints or visible evidence of path-beating anywhere around except the U.S.S. Millicent’s own. The U.S.S. Millicent Kent stowed a tennis ball in each hip pocket and took Mario’s claw and said here to walk this way and she’d show him real quick, and get his like feedback on the issue, and plus have a witness when they got back and she told people about it. Mario said the Husky VI came with its own pan head and cable release. With the girl supporting him with one hand and beating an easement through the brush with the other they proceeded deeper into the thicket on the lip. The outdoor light was now the same hue as U.S.S.M.K.’s hairbow. She said she swore to God it was around here someplace. Mario said his late dad had used a somewhat less snazzy IV-model Husky back in his early days of making art-films, when he also used a homemade dolly and sandbags and halogen spots instead of kliegs. Several different species and types of birds were twittering.

The U.S.S. Millicent Kent told Mario that off the record she’d always felt he had the longest lushest prettiest lashes of any boy on two continents, three if you counted Australia. Mario thanked her kindly, calling her Ma’am and trying to fake a Southern accent.

The U.S.S. Millicent Kent said she wasn’t sure what were her old footprints from finding the thicket with the tripod and what were their more recent footprints from trying to find the old footprints, and that she was worried because it was starting to get dark and they might not be able to find it and then Mario wouldn’t believe she’d seen something as batshit- sounding as a gleaming silvery tripod all set up for no reason in the middle of nowheresville.

Mario said he was pretty sure that Australia was a continent. Walking, he came up to around the bottom of U.S.S. Millicent’s ribcage.

Mario heard crackling and thrashing from some other thicket nearby but was certain it wasn’t Hal, since Hal very rarely made a lot of motion-noise either outside or in-.

The U.S.S. Millicent Kent told Mario that though she was an admittedly great player, w/ an overwhelming haul-ass-up-to-the-net-and-loom-over-it- like-a-titan game in the Betty Stove/Venus Williams power-game tradition,

and headed for an almost limitless future in the Show, she’d confide in him in private out here that she’d never really loved competitive tennis, that her real love and passion was modern interpretive dance, at which she admittedly had less unconsciously native gifts and talents to bring to bear, but which she loved, and had spent just about all her off-court time as a little girl practicing in a leotard in front of a double-width mirror in her room at home in suburban Montclair NJ, but that tennis was what she had limitless talent at and got emotional strokes and tuition-waiver boarding- school offers in, and that she’d been desperate to get into a boarding school.

Mario asked if she could recall if the Husky-VI tripod had been the TL one with waffle-gridded rubber tips on the legs and a 360° pan head or the SL one with unwaffled tips and only a 180° pan head that swiveled in an arc instead of a full circle. The U.S.S. Millicent revealed that she’d accepted a scholarship to E.T.A. at age nine for the sole reason of getting away from her father. She referred to her father as her Old Man, which you can just tell she capitalizes. Her mother had left home when the U.S.S. Millicent was only five, running off very abruptly with a man sent by what had then been called Con-Edison to do a free home-energy-efficiency assessment. It had been six years since she’d laid an eyeball on her Old Man, but to the best of her recall he was almost three meters tall and morbidly obese, which had been why every mirror and bathtub in the house had been double-width.

One older sister who’d been deeply involved in synchronized swimming had got pregnant and married in high school soon after her mother’s departure.

All this time there’s been more crackling and crashing off up the hillside. Mario has trouble on any kind of declined grade. Some sort of bird’s sitting in the top branch of a little tree and looking at them without saying anything. Mario thinks suddenly of a joke he remembers hearing Michael Pemulis tell: ‘If two people get married in West Virginia and then pull up stakes and move to Massachusetts and then if they decide they want to get a divorce, what’s the biggest problem getting a divorce?’ The U.S.S.M.K. says her other older sister had at just fifteen joined the Ice Capades of all things, and was in the back-up-like chorus where the biggest artistic challenge was not bumping into people and either falling or making them fall.

‘Getting a divorce from your sister, because in West Virginia Pemulis said a lot of people who get married are brother and sister.’

‘Hold my hand.’ ‘He was only joking, though.’ By now the light was about the same color as the ash and clinkers in the bottom of a Weber Grill. The U.S.S. Millicent Kent was leading them in a set of slightly diminishing circles. Then, she said, at age eight she came home early from after-school drills at the U.S.T.A. Jr. Facility in Passaic NJ looking forward to slipping into the old leotard and getting in some modern interpretive dancing up in her room, only to come home suddenly and find her father wearing her leotard. Which needless to say didn’t fit very well.

And with the small front portion of his huge bare feet squeezed into a pair of strapless pumps Mrs. Kent had left behind in her haste. In the dining room he’d moved all the furniture over to the side of, in front of the really wide mirror, in a grotesquely tiny and bulging violet leotard, capering.

Mario says violet’s really the U.S.S. Millicent’s color. She says that was the exact creepy word for it: capering. Pirouetting and rondelling. Simpering, as well. The crotch of her leotard looked like a slingshot, it was so deformed. He hadn’t heard her come in. U.S.S. Millicent asked Mario if he’d ever seen a girl’s yin-yang before. Obscene mottled hirsute flesh had pooched and spilled out over every centimeter of the leotard’s perimeter, she recalled. She’d had a voluptuous figure even at eight, she told Mario, but the Old Man was in a whole different-sized ballpark altogether. Mario kept saying Golly Ned, all he could think of to say. His flesh jiggled and bounced as he capered. It was repellent, she said. There was no sign of a Husky VI or any other model of tripod in any of the thickets and boscages.

Her literal term for it was ‘yin-yang.’ But her Old Man wasn’t just a cross- dressing transvestite, she said; it turned out they always had to be a relative’s female clothes. She said she always used to wonder why her sisters’ one-pieces and figure-skating skirts always looked so askewly baggy and elastic-shot, since the sisters didn’t exactly wear tiny little malnourished sizes themselves. The Old Man didn’t hear her come in and he capered and jetéed for several more minutes until she happened to catch his simpering eye in the mirror, she said. That’s when she knew she had to get away, she said. And Mario’s own old man’s Admissions lady had called

out of the blue that very evening, she said. Like it had been fate.

Serendipity. Kismet. ‘Yin-yang,’ Mario offered, nodding. The U.S.S. Millicent’s hand was large and hot and at the level of sogginess of a bathmat that’s been used several times in a row in quick succession.

Her second-oldest sister, many years later, had informed the U.S.S.M.K. that the first time anybody’d had any inklings about the Old Man was an episode when the older sister was very small and Mrs. K. had sewed her a special costume complete with gold-lamé bow & arrow for playing Cupid in the school Valentine’s Day pageant, and the sister’s school had got out early one day after an asbestos scare and she’d come unexpectedly home and found the Old Man in the basement rumpus room in tiny wings and hideously distended diaper striking a pose from a rather well-known Titian oil in the Met’s High Renaissance Wing, and had struggled with denial and own-perceptions-doubting for quite some time thereafter, until a hysterical episode during rehearsals for an Ice Capades Valentine’s Day number brought all the feelings surging up and broke the denial, and the Ice Capades’ Employee Assistance Office counselling staff helped her start to work it all through.

At which point U.S.S. Millicent stopped them in an unprickly thicket of what later turned out to be poison sumac and turned with a strange glint in the one eye that wasn’t in pine-shadow and crushed Mario’s large head to the area just below her breasts and said she needed to confess that Mario’s eyelashes and vest with extendable police lock he used for staying upright in one place had for quite some time now driven her right around the bend with sensual feeling. What Mario perceived as a sudden radical drop in the prevailing temperature was in fact the U.S.S. Millicent Kent’s sexual stimulation sucking tremendous quantities of ambient energy out of the air surrounding them. Mario’s face was so squashed against the U.S.S.

Millicent’s thorax that he had to contort his mouth way out to the left to breathe. U.S.S.M.K.’s hairbow became detached and fluttered down through Mario’s sightline like a giant crazed violet moth. U.S.S.M.K. was trying to undo Mario’s corduroys but was frustrated by the complex system of snaps and fasteners at the bottom of his police lock’s Velcro vest, which overlapped his trouser’s own fasteners, and Mario tried to reconfigure his mouth somehow to both breathe and warn the U.S.S.M.K. that he was

incredibly ticklish in the area of the bellybutton and directly below. He could now start to hear his brother Hal somewhere to the above and east, calling Mario’s name at a moderate volume. The U.S.S. Millicent Kent was saying there was no way Mario could be any more nervous than she was about what was happening between them. It’s true that the sounds of Mario sucking air out of a severely leftward-contorted mouth could have been interpretable as the heavy breathing of sexual stimulation. It was when the U.S.S. Millicent wrapped one arm around his shoulder for leverage and forced her other hand up under the hem of the tight vest and then down inside the trousers and briefs, rooting for a penis, that Mario became so ticklish that he began to double up, clearing his face of U.S.S. Millicent’s front and laughing out loud in such a distinctive high-pitched way that Hal had no trouble beelining right upon them, compromised though his navigational systems were after fifteen or so secret minutes alone in the fragrant pines.

Mario later said it was just like when there was a word on the tip of your tongue that try as you might you can’t remember until the exact second you stop trying, and in it pops, right into your head: it was when the three of them were walking together back up the hillside toward the tree-line’s lip, not trying to do anything but get back to Comm.-Ad. by the most direct route in the dark, that they stumbled upon the cinematic tripod, a dully glinting TL waffle-tipped Husky, in the middle of what wasn’t such a very tall or thick thicket at all.

30 APRIL — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

Steeply said ‘Choosing Boston as your Ops center, after all, which to us signifies: the place of the supposed Entertainment’s origin.’ Marathe made a gesture of being willing to take time and play along, if Steeply wished it. ‘But also the city Boston U.S.A. has logic. Your closest city to the Convexity. Closest therefore to Québec. Within as you say the distance of spit.’ His wheelchair squeaked very slightly whenever he moved. An automobile horn somewhere between the city and themselves blew a sustained blast. It grew always colder down on the desert floor; they could feel this. He felt gratitude for his windbreaker.

Steeply flicked some ashes from his cigarette with a coarse thumb- gesture that was not yet feminine. ‘But we’re not any more sure that they actually do have copies. Also, does this quote “anti”-Entertainment the film’s director supposedly made to counter the lethality: does it really also 47 exist; this really could be some sort of game for you and the F.L.Q., to hold out the promise of the anti-Entertainment as a chip for concessions. As some kind of remedy or antidote.’ ‘Of this anti-film that antidotes the seduction of the Entertainment we have no evidence except craziness of rumors.’ Steeply used a technical interviewer’s device of pretending to occupy himself with small physical chores of preening and hygiene, delaying, to have Marathe elaborate himself more fully. The lights of the city Tucson with their movements and twinkling made a globe of light such as on ceilings at les salles de danser in Val d’Or, Québec. Marathe’s wife was 48 dying slowly of ventricular restenosis. He thought: die twice.

Marathe said: ‘And also why do they never send you into the field as yourself, Steeply? This is to say in appearance. The last time you were — what is it I hope to say — a Negro, for almost one year, no?’ U.S.A. persons’ shrugs are always as if trying to lift a heavy thing. ‘Haitian,’ Steeply said. ‘I was Haitian. Some negroid tendencies in the persona, maybe.’ Marathe listened to Steeply be silent. A U.S.A. coyote sounds more like a high-strung dog. The automobile’s horn continued, sounding to the men forlorn and somehow nautical out below in the dark.

The feminine manner to examine the fingernails was to raise the whole hand’s back into view instead of malely curling the nails in over the upturned palm; Marathe recalled knowing this from a very young age.

Steeply would pick at the corners of his lip, then for an interval change to examining the fingernails. His silences seemed always comfortable and contained. He was a competent operative. More cold air came, odd eddied breezes up in over the shelf from the desert’s floor, puffs of sudden air as if from the turning of a volume’s pages. His bare arms had the plucked- chicken look of chilled and bare skin in his grotesque sleeveless dress.

Marathe had not been aware of when during the falling of night Steeply had removed the absurd sunglasses, but decided the exact moment of this did not matter for reporting every word and gesture back to M. Fortier. Again

the coyote, and also another farther off, perhaps to answer. The sounds were like that of a domestic dog being given low voltage. Les Assassins’ M.

Fortier and M. Broullîme and some others of his comrades-on-wheels believed Rémy Marathe to be eidetic, near-perfect in recall and detail.

Marathe, who could remember several incidents of crucial observations he had failed to later recall, knew this was not true.

30 APRIL — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

Several times also Marathe called U.S.A. to Steeply ‘Your walled nation’ or ‘Your murated nation.’

An oiled guru sits in yogic full lotus in Spandex and tank top. He’s maybe forty. He’s in full lotus on top of the towel dispenser just above the shoulder-pull station in the weight room of the Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield MA. Saucers of muscle protrude from him and run together so that he looks almost crustacean. His head gleams, his hair jet-black and extravagantly feathered. His smile could sell things. Nobody knows where he comes from or why’s he’s allowed to stay, but he’s always in there, sitting yogic about a meter off the rubberized floor of the weight room. His tank top says TRANSCEND in silkscreen; on the back it’s got DEUS PROVIDEBIT in Day-Glo orange. It’s always the same tank top. Sometimes the color of the Spandex leggings changes.

This guru lives off the sweat of others. Literally. The fluids and salts and fatty acids. He’s like a beloved nut. He’s an E.T.A. institution. You do like maybe some sets of benches, some leg-curls, inclined abs, crunches, work up a good hot shellac of sweat; then, if you let him lick your arms and forehead, he’ll pass on to you some little nugget of fitness-guru wisdom.

His big one for a long time was: ‘And the Lord said: Let not the weight thou wouldst pull to thyself exceed thine own weight.’ His advice on conditioning and injury-prevention tends to be pretty solid, is the consensus. His tongue is little and rough but feels good, like a kitty’s. It

isn’t like a faggy or sexual thing. Some of the girls let him, too. He’s harmless as they come. He supposedly went way back with Dr. Incandenza, the Academy’s founder, in the past.

Some of the newer kids think he’s a creep and want him out of there.

What kind of guru wears Spandex and lives off others’ perspiration? they complain. God only knows what he does in there when the weight room’s closed at night, they say.

Sometimes the newer kids who won’t even let him near them come in and set the resistance on the shoulder-pull at a weight greater than their own weight. The guru on the towel dispenser just sits there and smiles and doesn’t say anything. They hunker, then, and grimace, and try to pull the bar down, but, like, lo: the overweighted shoulder-pull becomes a chin-up.

Up they go, their own bodies, toward the bar they’re trying to pull down.

Everyone should get at least one good look at the eyes of a man who finds himself rising toward what he wants to pull down to himself. And I like how the guru on the towel dispenser doesn’t laugh at them, or even shake his head sagely on its big brown neck. He just smiles, hiding his tongue.

He’s like a baby. Everything he sees hits him and sinks without bubbles. He just sits there. I want to be like that. Able to just sit all quiet and pull life toward me, one forehead at a time. His name is supposedly Lyle.

It was yrstruly and C and Poor Tony that crewed that day and everything like that. The AM were wicked bright and us a bit sick however we scored our wake ups boosting some items at a sidewalk sale in the Harvard Squar where it were warm upping and the snow coming off onnings and then later Poor Tony ran across an old Patty citizen type of his old aquaintance from like the Cape and Poor Tony got over and pretended like he would give a blow job On The House and we got the citizen to get in his ride with us and crewed on him good and we got enough $ off the Patty type to get straightened out for true all day and crewed on him hard and C wanted we should elemonade the Patty’s map for keeps and everything like that and take his ride to this understanding slope strip shop he knows in Chinatown but Poor Tony turns white as a shit and said by no means and put up an arguement and everything like that and we just left the type there in his vehicle off Mem Dr we broke the jaw for insentive not to eat no cheese and C insisted and was not 2Bdenied and took off one ear which there was a

mess and everything like that and then C throws the ear away after in a dumster so yrstrulys’ like so what was the exact pernt to that like. The dumster was with the dumsters out by Steves’ donuts in the Enfield Squar.

We go back to the Brighton Projects to cop and Roy Tony was always there on his bench in the Playground in late AM but now all the Project Nigers was awake and out in the Playground and it was tense but it was day time and everything like that and we cop half a bundle from Roy Tony and we go down to the library at Copley where we stash our personnel works when we crewed and went into the mensroom where there was severel works on the floor allready that early and got straight in the stall and C and yrstruly had a beef about who shot three and who got two and we made Poor Tony give us up his third bag and then but we had to cop for that nite and tomorrow AM still which was XMas and had to cop in advance, its’ a never ending strugle its’ a full time job to stay straight and there is no vacation for XMas at anytime. Its’ a fucking bitch of a life dont’ let any body get over on you diffrent. And back we go to the Harvard Squar however on arrival Poor Tony wanted he should hang for lunch time with his red leather fags in the Bow&Arrow and pretty much I can tolerate fags when alone but together yrstruly I cant’ fucking stand fags and yrstruly and C said fuck this shit and we screwed out and go up to the Central Squar where it was cool offing and the onnings re freezing and everything like that and snowing and boosted NyQuil at the CVS Drug where we go to the mop aile and employ a mophandle in tilting the mirror over the NyQuil aile and boosted NyQuil in Cs’ coat and got messed up on NyQuil and scored a bookbag off a foran slope studn type kid on the Redline platform but it only had books and disks and the diskcase was fucking plastic and into a dumster with it it goes but also at this time we come up and run into Kely Vinoy that was working her corner by the dumster by Cheap-O records in the Squar by the email place and shes’ dopesick having a conversession with Eckwus and an other man and Eckwus said he said Stokely Darkstar just got freetested again at the Fenway and confirmed a big Boot 8.8 hes’ got the Virus for sure and Purpleboy said he said Dark-star said how if he was going down he didnt’ give a shit and wasnt’ going to give a shit if he gave some others the Virus thru trancemission and the Word was out&about dont’ share Stokely Darkstars’ works dont’ use works off Stokely Darkstar no matter how sick you are even if your’ dyng for it get other works. Like C said any thing

would count in your mind when your’ sick and had copped and was minus works and Darkstar had works. We all every crew with heads left have personnel works for only ourselves that we use except blownout old hose like Kely and Purpleboy there Man takes there $ and there works and Hes’ the only one can give them there shots and keep Kely just this side of dopesick 24-7 for insentive for her to make him more $ and everything like that, theres’ nothing wurse than a Pimp and Boston Pimps are the wurst there’ 10X wurse than NYC Pimps that are supperst to be so hartless in NYC where yrstruly petaled ass in the Columbus Squar for a time of my youth like Stokely Darkstar before departing for green pastures, and we had a conversession but were’ coming down and it was getting dark and snowing for a White XMas and if we didnt’ crew before like 2200 Roy Tonys’ Nigers would be too drunk to keep them from beefing with us and thered’ be a beef and everything like that if we go to cop after 2200 and who needs a grief so back we Redline to the Harvard Squar and all the foran studns are in the bars and we locate Poor Tony smoking hash with fags back of Au Bon Pain and say lets roll a foran studn stuck here for XMas in the bars and cop before 2200 and so we all go on the ice from the frozen melted snow to the Bow&Arrow in the Squar with Poor Tony and Lolasister and Susan T. Cheese who I fucking cant’ stand and got in there and made Susan T. Cheese buy beers and we wait and no studns are leaving alone to roll but a older type individual who any body could see is no studn but is legless on shots alone at the bar fucking shatered slumped over is getting ready to depart for green pastures and Poor Tony tells Lolasister to screw she crews with Poor Tony some times but not if its’ wet work and with Cs’ involvement its’ always wet work, and yrstruly I inform Susan T. Cheese she new better than not to screw as well and the older individual de parts shatered and holding onto walls in a hiclass and promising coat for the possibility of $ and pernts his old nose this way and that and everything like that thru the Bow&Arrow window C wipes the steam off, and has a conversession with a Santaclaus ringing a big bell for the kettle and were’ like Jesus its’ a never ending strugle to wait and cop but after awhile finally after stifing the Santaclaus we watch he picks a direction finally at last up Mass Ave toward the Central Squar on foot, and Poor Tony beats it around the block to get up in front of him around the block on the ice in his fucking heels and feather snake around his neck and gets him some how Poor Tony

always knows how over to the dumsters’ alley by Bay Bank off Sherman St, and yrstruly and C crew on the individual and roll him and C messes up his older map to a large degree and we leave him in no condition to eat cheese in a snow drift of materil under the dumster, and C again wants to siphon out a vehicle on Mass Av and set him on fire but he has 400 $ on his person and then some and a coat with a fury collar and a watch we realy scored and C even gosofar to take the non studns’ shoes which they dont’ fit, and in the dumster they go.

And but so but back we go to the Brighton Projects but its’ post 2200 its’ too late Roy Tony hasnt’ got his pissboys out hes’ not open for comerce and yet it is like a Niger Convenssion in the Playground of the Brighton Projects with there glass pipes and there Crown Royal in purple bags and everything like that in the Playground of the Projects and if they smell were’ holding this kindof $ amounts they will crew on us in numbers there’ animals at nite with there purple velvet bags and p-dope and Redi Rok crack, one large Niger in a Patriots hat has a hart incident and downhegoes on the black top by the swing set right in front of us and none of his brothers unquot gosofar to do any thing he lays there there’ animals at nite and we screw out with rickytick speed from the Brighton Projects, and we converse. And Poor Tony wants to just go over the line to the Enfield Squar and try and just cop p-dope from Delphina down by the Empire hangers or else what else hang with the fags at Steves’ donuts and hear who else is holding weight in Enfield or Allston and everything like that, but Delphinas’ p is from bunk the Word is out&about that its’ all Manitol and kwai9 you might as well fucking cop XLax or Schweppes and C dopeslaps Poor Tony and C wants to Redline down to Chinatown but Poor Tony turns white as a shit and says Chinatowns’ too dear in $ and everything like that, even for like bundles, Dr. Wo is 200 $ but atleast its’ always good and but we have 400 $ and then some and C pernts out we can fucking well afford Wos’ well known exellent skeet for once at XMas and Poor Tony stamps a hiheel and says but how weve’ got enough $ to stay straight and get Lolasister straight for XMas and all lay up and not have to never ending strugle at XMas and two or more days after that if we dont’ blow it on XMas Eve in Chinatown instead of waiting which is a good pernt but when has any body known C to ever wait he gets dopesick faster than us and everything like that and is all piss and vinegar for Wo and starting with the

Shivers and with the noses’ mucis all ready and everything like that and C is not 2Bdenied and we say we are screwing down to Chinatown and if Poor Tony dont’ want to come he can take a like a giant breath and hold it in the Squar until we get back and well’ cop for him, and Poor Tony says he might be a dicksucking fag but hes’ not a starry eyed’ moroon.

And so offwego and everything like that with 400 $ on the Orangeline, and thru a fucked up circumstances yrstruly and C almost end up raping a older type nurse in a white nurses’ uniform and coat on the train but we dont’ and but Poor Tony seems white and detracted on the train playng with his feather snake and says he says he seems in his mind maybe to recall an involvment in some type deal where Dr. Wo might of got slightly got over on and burnt and that maybe down in Chinatown we could air on the side of low profiles and try to cop some where else except from the Wos’. Except Dr. Wo is who we know. C is Wos’ former aquaintance from crewing with slopes on the North shore for Whity Sorkin in the days of his youth. C is not 2Bdenied. And so at the Orangeline Tstop we grab a fat cab to about two blocks from Hung Toys and screw out of the cab at a light and the thing with fat cabbies is they cant’ run after you and Poor Tony is pisser to watch tearassing it down the street in hiheels with a feather stoal. Poor Tony runs right by the front of Hung Toys, this is by pryor agreement to wait for us low profile down the street and yrstruly and C go in Hung Toys where they dont’ open till 2300 and sell tea unquot like 100 Proof tea till all hours and everything like that and never get Inspected because Dr. Wo has arrangements with Chinatowns’ Finest. XMas is noncelebrated in Chinatown. Dr. Wo a good thing about Wo is hes’ always there in Hung Toys at known times. Here theres’ all old slope racial type ladies sitting in booths eating noddles and drinking quot tea out of white cups the size of a shotglass and everything like that. With small slope kids tearassing it all over and older men in like jew caps and skinny beerds out of just the middle of there chin but Dr. Wo is only middle aged and wears iron glasses and a tie and looks more like a banker for a slope but he is 100 % business and icecold all the way down for slope type comerce plus hes’ connected bigtime and not to be fucked or got over on if some body has a head left and yrstruly I cant’ believe Poor Tony would ever take part of tryng to crew on Wo who he knows thru C in even the smallest comerce and if he did C says he sure never heard about it nor saw any of the skeet or anything like that,

and why. Cs’ the one that knows Wo. We arranged Poor Tony to wait for us out side and try to be low profile. Its’ sub 0 snow and hes’ in a leather spring coat and stoal and brown wig thats’ not as good as a hat and hell’ freeze his low profile balls off and C was tryng to smile and he told Dr. Wo we needed three bundles and Dr. Wo was smiling in his slope manner said the boosting life must surely be exellent and C laughed and said most exellent Cs’ tight with slopes he does the talking and everything like that, and he says were’ going to lay up low profile for the XMas vacation and not crew because I had a rape type situation from an older nurse last nite on the T and almost got pinched by the Ts’ Finest and Dr. Wo nods in a special subservant manner he uses for non slopes who hes’ realy polite with but hes’ a dictater to his slopes when we see him with his subservant slopes but with us were’ allike most polite and everything like conversession and its’ nice but expensive but it feels nice at the time but Wo finishes his so called tea and Wo goes back behind the curtains in the back of Hung Toys thats’ a giant brightred curtain with purple mountains or hills and clouds that are flyng snakes with leather wings that is one curtain yrstruly would want to boost for personnel hanging use that no body that isnt’ a slope and isnt’ in with Wo cant’ never go behind it but you can see when he opens it and goes behind the curtain it looks like merly more old slope ladies sitting on packing cases with slope writing eating more noddles in bowls they hold about like a millmeter from their yellow maps and everything like that.

Slopes rarly stop shovling in the old noddles. Stokely Darkstar calls them maggoteaters and subservant slopes keep going in and out of the curtain while Wos’ back there a longer than avrege time and Cs’ got the Shivers and starting to jones and dope-fiends are full of super station and he says to yrstruly he says the fuck he says maybe what if Poor Tony realy did take part with burning Wo and what if a slope sees Poor Tony out side and is one of these slopes going in and out of the curtain maybe telling Wo, like ratting out Poor Tony as our aquaintance, and my mucis is starting and were’ jonesing super statiously over PT and wheres’ Wo behind the curtain and everything like that, tryng to smile and conversession ultralow, drinking quot tea thats’ like schnapps only wurse and green. And we jones and Dr.

Wo comes back finally at last out smiling subservantly with all the wonderful skeet three bundles in a newspaper who could fucking read it but the pictures are of slope VIPs’ in suits and Wo sits down, and Wo never sits

down at the booth with the skeet it isnt’ done in his comerce, and Wos’ hands are folded over our skeet in the thing and Wo smiling says he asks C if weve’ seen goodold Poor Tony or Susan T. Cheese around we crew with Poor Tony in boosting life did we not he said. C he says PT is a fucking dicksucking fag queer and a proven cheeseater and wed’ fucked up his map and Cheese and Lolasisters’ map in a beef and didnt’ crew with fags since aprox the autum period. C is pouring mucis and tryng to smile cusually, Dr.

Wo laughed in a harty fashion and said exellent and Wo leaned over our skeet sayng if we should happenbychance to see Poor Tony or them to please give Poor Tony his quite best regards and wish him prosparity and a thousand blisses. And everything like that. And we promote the newspaper of skeet and Wo promotes our $ and very politely outwego and I admit it yrstruly wanted we should burn Poor Tony and rickytick the fuck out of Chinatown but we go over down more by the China Pearl Place and Poor Tony is sortof hunched behind a lightpoal with his gray teeth chatting in his dress and thin coat tryng to be low profile in his red coat and heels around a million+ slopes that all are subservants of Wo. And later after screwing out we didnt’ tell him of what Wo said about sitting down and asking about him and Cheeses’ blisses and we screw to the Orangeline to our hot air blowergrate we use at nite at the library behind the Copley Squar and we get our personnel works out from behind the brickworks behind the bush by the hot blowergrate where we stash our works and were’ eggerly into the first bundle and were’ cooking up and notice Poor Tony doesnt’ the least bitch when yrstruly and C tie off first in line seeing as were’ the ones that copped it and Poor Tonys’ gotto wait as usal, except I notice he doesnt’ bitch even a little, normally Poor Tony keeps up this usal wine yrstruly learned how to not notice, but when he doesnt’ wine now that were’ jonesing and the skeets’ right there I notice hes’ cusually looking like every place but at the skeet which is unusal and C jonesing and with the Shivers cooking up tryng to keep his lighter lit in the hot airs’ wind and snow of nite, and I admit it yrstruly I get a wicked cold inside feeling even with all this hot air from the blowergrate blowing up from under us and making our hair blow around and Tonys’ feather snake pernt upword I yrstruly get a cold feeling of super station once more, you get wicked super stations in this fucked up kindof shit life because its’ a never ending chase and you get too tired to go by much more than never ending habit and super station and

everything like that so but I dont’ say any thing but yrstruly I have a cold super station about Poor Tony not wining while he makes like he has to cusually piss and takes a piss and the piss steams up around the lower ares of the bush with his back turned away and isnt’ looking around with interst or anything like that you never turn your back on the skeet when its’ partly your skeet which is wicked unusal which C is so eggerly dopesick he doesnt’ notice any thing past keeping the lighter lit. And so I admit it I yrstruly did yrstruly purplously let C tie off and boot up first while I still cooked up, I did cook up unusally slow, fucking with the getting the snowmelt hot in the spoon and everything like that yrstruly I let the lighter go out and took more time with the cotton and C had the Shivers wurst of us and cooks up the fastest and would of got it anyway. Later with Cs’ map elemonaded Poor Tony later conceited admitting Susan T. Cheese helped a Worcester fag get over on Wo for a fronted bundle in autum is why. And all three bundles Wo give us in slope news was Hotshots. Laced. It started the instantly C undid the belt and booted up we knew allready, yrstruly I and PT thearized it was Drano with the blue like glittershit and everything like that taken out by subservant slopes it had that Drano like effect on C and everything like that it was laced what ever it was C started with the screaming in a loud hipitch fashion instantly after he unties and boots and downhegoes flopping with his heels pouning on the metal of the blower- grate and hes’ at his throat with his hands tearing at him self in the most fucked up fashions and Poor Tony is hiheeling rickytick over over C zipping up sayng he screams sweety C but and stuffing the feather snake from his necks’ head in Cs’ mouth to shut him up from hipitch screaming in case Bostons’ Finest can hear involvment and blood and bloody materil is coming out Cs’ mouth and Cs’ nose and its’ allover the feathers its’ a sure sign of Drano, blood is and Cs’ eyes get beesly and bulge and hes’ cryng blood into the feathers in his mouth and tryng to hold onto my glove but Cs’ arms are going allover and one eye it like allofa sudden pops outof his map, like with a Pop you make with fingers in your mouth with all this blood and materil and a blue string at the back of the eye and the eye falls over the side of Cs’ map and hangs there looking at the fag Poor Tony. And C turned lightblue and bit thru the snakes’ head and died for keeps and shit his pants instanly with shit so bad the hot air blowergrate is blowing small bits of fart and blood and missty shit up into our maps and Poor Tony backs offof over

C and puts his hands over his madeup map and looks at C thru his fingers.

And yrstruly I take the belt off it goes without saying, and dont’ even rethink or dream about tryng maybe a diffrent bag out of a diffrent bundle from C for how could Wo know what bundle wed’ cook up outof first so all three bundles must be Hot so I dont’ even dream even tho yrstrulys’ Shiverng and mucis sick allready and now in payback Wo has our only $ to get straight with for XMas. It might sound fucking low but the reason we had to leave the decesed body C in one of the librarys’ dumsters is the reason is because the Copley Squars’ Finest know it is our personnel hot air blowergrate and if we leave C there its’ a sure pinch for us as known aquaintance and a period of Kicking The Bird in holding in a cell but the dumster was empty of materil and Cs’ head made a fucked up sound when it hit the empty bottom and Poor Tony cried and wined and said he said he had no inkling that beast Wo was that vindicative and poorold decesed C and how this was it hes’ going to get clean from heronout and get a straightjob dancing in a Patty type Club in the Fenway and everything like that on and on piss and wine. I didnt’ say any thing. I had to rethink on the T to the Squar if yrstruly I should elemonade Poor Tonys’ map for keeps for payback on how he purplously lets C shoot up first and wouldof’ let yrstruly shoot first even knowing, or make that cheese move and go back down the Orangeline to Wo and try and get enough bags to get true straight eating cheese to Wo about the wherehouse that Poor Tony and Susan T.

Cheese and Lolasister with Eckwus crashed at now. Or like what. Yrstruly I almost was cryng. It was when Poor Tony took off his hiheels and wanted yrstruly I should boost him like over the edge of Cs’ bodies’ dumster to get back what was left of his feather stoal out of Cs’ mouth that yrstruly I thought I decided what to do. But the connected slope Wo wasnt’ even there in front of the Hung Toys curtain in the early XMas AM, and then Poor Tony departed for green pastures and ate cheese, and it took yrstruly two days of Kicking The Bird in the hall out side my Mumsters’ apartment that for payback she locked the door before I yrstruly can get in a Detox to atleast cop some methedoan and get three squars to stay down in yrstruly to start to thearize on what to try and do after I could standup straight and walk upright again once more.