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CHAPTER ONE
YEAR OF GLAD
I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies. My posture is
consciously congruent to the shape of my hard chair. This is a cold room
in University Administration, wood-walled, Remington-hung, double-windowed
against the November heat, insulated from Administrative
sounds by the reception area outside, at which Uncle Charles, Mr. deLint
and I were lately received.
I am in here.
Three faces have resolved into place above summer-weight sportcoats
and half-Windsors across a polished pine conference table shiny with the
spidered light of an Arizona noon. These are three Deans--of Admissions,
Academic Affairs, Athletic Affairs. I do not know which face belongs to
whom.
I believe I appear neutral, maybe even pleasant, though I've been coached
to err on the side of neutrality and not attempt what would feel to me like a
pleasant expression or smile.
I have committed to crossing my legs I hope carefully, ankle on knee,
hands together in the lap of my slacks. My fingers are mated into a mirrored
series of what manifests, to me, as the letter X. The interview room's other
personnel include: the University's Director of Composition, its varsity
tennis coach, and Academy protector Mr. A. deLint. C.T. is beside me; the
others sit, stand and stand, respectively, at the periphery of my focus. The
tennis coach jingles pocket-change. There is something vaguely digestive
about the room's odor. The high-traction sole of my complimentary Nike
sneaker runs parallel to the wobbling loafer of my mother's half-brother,
here in his capacity as Headmaster, sitting in the chair to what I hope is my
immediate right, also facing Deans.
The Dean at left, a lean yellowish man whose fixed smile nevertheless has
the impermanent quality of something stamped into uncooperative material,
is a personality-type I've come lately to appreciate, the type who delays
need of any response from me by relating my side of the story for me, to me.
Passed a packet of computer-sheets by the shaggy lion of a Dean at center,
he is speaking more or less to these pages, smiling down.
`You are Harold Incandenza, eighteen, date of secondary-school graduation
approximately one month from now, attending the Enfield Tennis
Academy, Enfield, Massachusetts, a boarding school, where you reside.' His
reading glasses are rectangular, court-shaped, the sidelines at top and
bottom. `You are, according to Coach White and Dean [unintelligible], a
regionally, nationally, and continentally ranked junior tennis player, a potential
O.N.A.N.C.A.A. athlete of substantial promise, recruited by Coach
White via correspondence with Dr. Tavis here commencing . . . February of
this year.' The top page is removed and brought around neatly to the bottom
of the sheaf, at intervals. `You have been in residence at the Enfield
Tennis Academy since age seven.'
I am debating whether to risk scratching the right side of my jaw, where
there is a wen.
`Coach White informs our offices that he holds the Enfield Tennis Academy's
program and achievements in high regard, that the University of Arizona
tennis squad has profited from the prior matriculation of several
former E.T.A. alumni, one of whom was one Mr. Aubrey F. deLint, who
appears also to be with you here today. Coach White and his staff have
given us--'
The yellow administrator's usage is on the whole undistinguished,
though I have to admit he's made himself understood. The Director of Composition
seems to have more than the normal number of eyebrows. The
Dean at right is looking at my face a bit strangely.
Uncle Charles is saying that though he can anticipate that the Deans
might be predisposed to weigh what he avers as coming from his possible
appearance as a kind of cheerleader for E.T.A., he can assure the assembled
Deans that all this is true, and that the Academy has presently in residence
no fewer than a third of the continent's top thirty juniors, in age brackets all
across the board, and that I here, who go by `Hal,' usually, am `right up
there among the very cream.' Right and center Deans smile professionally;
the heads of deLint and the coach incline as the Dean at left clears his throat:
`--belief that you could well make, even as a freshman, a real contribution
to this University's varsity tennis program. We are pleased,' he either
says or reads, removing a page, `that a competition of some major sort here
has brought you down and given us the chance to sit down and chat together
about your application and potential recruitment and matriculation
and scholarship.'
`I've been asked to add that Hal here is seeded third, Boys' 18-and-Under
Singles, in the prestigious What aBurger Southwest Junior Invitational out at
the Randolph Tennis Center--' says what I infer is Athletic Affairs, his
cocked head showing a freckled scalp.
`Out at Randolph Park, near the outstanding El Con Marriott,' C.T. inserts,
`a venue the whole contingent's been vocal about finding absolutely
top-hole thus far, which--'
`Just so, Chuck, and that according to Chuck here Hal has already justified
his seed, he's reached the semifinals as of this morning's apparently
impressive win, and that he'll be playing out at the Center again tomorrow,
against the winner of a quarterfinal game tonight, and so will be playing
tomorrow at I believe scheduled for 0830--'
`Try to get under way before the godawful heat out there. Though of
course a dry heat.'
`--and has apparently already qualified for this winter's Continental Indoors,
up in Edmonton, Kirk tells me--' cocking further to look up and left
at the varsity coach, whose smile's teeth are radiant against a violent
sunburn--'Which is something indeed.' He smiles, looking at me. `Did we
get all that right Hal.'
C.T. has crossed his arms casually; their triceps' flesh is webbed with
mottle in the air-conditioned sunlight. `You sure did. Bill.' He smiles. The
two halves of his mustache never quite match. `And let me say if I may that
Hal's excited, excited to be invited for the third year running to the Invitational
again, to be back here in a community he has real affection for, to
visit with your alumni and coaching staff, to have already justified his high
seed in this week's not unstiff competition, to as they say still be in it without
the fat woman in the Viking hat having sung, so to speak, but of course
most of all to have a chance to meet you gentlemen and have a look at the
facilities here. Everything here is absolutely top-slot, from what he's seen.'
There is a silence. DeLint shifts his back against the room's panelling and
recenters his weight. My uncle beams and straightens a straight watchband.
62.5% of the room's faces are directed my way, pleasantly expectant. My
chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it. I compose what I project will be
seen as a smile. I turn this way and that, slightly, sort of directing the expression
to everyone in the room.
There is a new silence. The yellow Dean's eyebrows go circumflex. The
two other Deans look to the Director of Composition. The tennis coach has
moved to stand at the broad window, feeling at the back of his crewcut.
Uncle Charles strokes the forearm above his watch. Sharp curved palm-shadows
move slightly over the pine table's shine, the one head's shadow a
black moon.
`Is Hal all right, Chuck?' Athletic Affairs asks. `Hal just seemed to . . .
well, grimace. Is he in pain? Are you in pain, son?'
`Hal's right as rain,' smiles my uncle, soothing the air with a casual hand.
`Just a bit of a let's call it maybe a facial tic, slightly, at all the adrenaline of
being here on your impressive campus, justifying his seed so far without
dropping a set, receiving that official written offer of not only waivers but a
living allowance from Coach White here, on Pac 10 letterhead, being ready
in all probability to sign a National Letter of Intent right here and now this
very day, he's indicated to me.' C.T. looks to me, his look horribly mild. I do
the safe thing, relaxing every muscle in my face, emptying out all expression.
I stare carefully into the Kekulean knot of the middle Dean's necktie.
My silent response to the expectant silence begins to affect the air of the
room, the bits of dust and sportcoat-lint stirred around by the AC's vents
dancing jaggedly in the slanted plane of windowlight, the air over the table
like the sparkling space just above a fresh-poured seltzer. The coach, in a
slight accent neither British nor Australian, is telling C.T. that the whole
application-interface process, while usually just a pleasant formality, is
probably best accentuated by letting the applicant speak up for himself.
Right and center Deans have inclined together in soft conference, forming a
kind of tepee of skin and hair. I presume it's probably facilitate that the
tennis coach mistook for accentuate, though accelerate, while clunkier than
facilitate, is from a phonetic perspective more sensible, as a mistake. The
Dean with the flat yellow face has leaned forward, his lips drawn back from
his teeth in what I see as concern. His hands come together on the conference
table's surface. His own fingers look like they mate as my own four-X
series dissolves and I hold tight to the sides of my chair.
We need candidly to chat re potential problems with my application, they
and I, he is beginning to say. He makes a reference to candor and its value.
`The issues my office faces with the application materials on file from
you, Hal, involve some test scores.' He glances down at a colorful sheet of
standardized scores in the trench his arms have made. `The Admissions staff
is looking at standardized test scores from you that are, as I'm sure you
know and can explain, are, shall we say ... subnormal.' I'm to explain.
It's clear that this really pretty sincere yellow Dean at left is Admissions.
And surely the little aviarian figure at right is Athletics, then, because
the facial creases of the shaggy middle Dean are now pursed in a kind
of distanced affront, an I'm-eating-something-that-makes-me-really-
appreciate-the-presence-of-whatever-I'm-drinking-along-with-it look that
spells professionally Academic reservations. An uncomplicated loyalty to
standards, then, at center. My uncle looks to Athletics as if puzzled. He
shifts slightly in his chair.
The incongruity between Admissions's hand- and face-color is almost
wild. `--verbal scores that are just quite a bit closer to zero than we're
comfortable with, as against a secondary-school transcript from the institution
where both your mother and her brother are administrators--' reading
directly out of the sheaf inside his arms' ellipse--'that this past year, yes,
has fallen off a bit, but by the word I mean "fallen off" to outstanding from
three previous years of frankly incredible.'
`Off the charts.'
`Most institutions do not even have grades of A with multiple pluses after
it,' says the Director of Composition, his expression impossible to interpret.
`This kind of . . . how shall I put it . . . incongruity,' Admissions says, his
expression frank and concerned, `I've got to tell you sends up a red flag of
potential concern during the admissions process.'
`We thus invite you to explain the appearance of incongruity if not outright
shenanigans.' Students has a tiny piping voice that's absurd coming out of a face this big.
`Surely by incredible you meant very very very impressive, as opposed to
literally quote "incredible," surely,' says C.T., seeming to watch the coach
at the window massaging the back of his neck. The huge window gives out
on nothing more than dazzling sunlight and cracked earth with heat-shimmers
over it.
`Then there is before us the matter of not the required two but nine separate
application essays, some of which of nearly monograph-length, each
without exception being--' different sheet--'the adjective various evaluators
used was quote "stellar"--'
Dir. of Comp.: `I made in my assessment deliberate use of lapidary and
effete.'
`--but in areas and with titles, I'm sure you recall quite well, Hal:
"Neoclassical Assumptions in Contemporary Prescriptive Grammar,"
"The Implications of Post-Fourier Transformations for a Holographically
Mimetic Cinema," "The Emergence of Heroic Stasis in Broadcast
Entertainment"--'
`"Montague Grammar and the Semantics of Physical Modality"?'
`"A Man Who Began to Suspect He Was Made of Glass"?'
`"Tertiary Symbolism in Justinian Erotica"?'
Now showing broad expanses of recessed gum. `Suffice to say that there's
some frank and candid concern about the recipient of these unfortunate test
scores, though perhaps explainable test scores, being these essays' sole individual
author.'
`I'm not sure Hal's sure just what's being implied here,' my uncle says.
The Dean at center is fingering his lapels as he interprets distasteful computed
data.
`What the University is saying here is that from a strictly academic point
of view there are admission problems that Hal needs to try to help us iron
out. A matriculant's first role at the University is and must be as a student.
We couldn't admit a student we have reason to suspect can't cut the mustard,
no matter how much of an asset he might be on the field.'
`Dean Sawyer means the court, of course, Chuck,' Athletic Affairs says,
head severely cocked so he's including the White person behind him in the
address somehow. `Not to mention O.N.A.N.C.A.A. regulations and investigators
always snuffling around for some sort of whiff of the smell of impropriety.'
The varsity tennis coach looks at his own watch.
`Assuming these board scores are accurate reflectors of true capacity in
this case,' Academic Affairs says, his high voice serious and sotto, still looking
at the file before him as if it were a plate of something bad, `I'll tell you
right now my opinion is it wouldn't be fair. It wouldn't be fair to the other
applicants. Wouldn't be fair to the University community.' He looks at me.
`And it'd be especially unfair to Hal himself. Admitting a boy we see as
simply an athletic asset would amount to just using that boy. We're under
myriad scrutiny to make sure we're not using anybody. Your board results,
son, indicate that we could be accused of using you.'
Uncle Charles is asking Coach White to ask the Dean of Athletic Affairs
whether the weather over scores would be as heavy if I were, say, a revenue-raising
football prodigy. The familiar panic at feeling misperceived is rising,
and my chest bumps and thuds. I expend energy on remaining utterly silent
in my chair, empty, my eyes two great pale zeros. People have promised to
get me through this.
Uncle C.T., though, has the pinched look of the cornered. His voice
takes on an odd timbre when he's cornered, as if he were shouting as he
receded. `Hal's grades at E.T.A., which is I should stress an Academy,
not simply a camp or factory, accredited by both the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts and the North American Sports Academy Association, it's
focused on the total needs of the player and student, founded by a towering
intellectual figure whom I hardly need name, here, and based by
him on the rigorous Oxbridge Quadrivium-Trivium curricular model, a
school fully staffed and equipped, by a fully certified staff, should show
that my nephew here can cut just about any Pac 10 mustard that needs
cutting, and that--'
DeLint is moving toward the tennis coach, who is shaking his head.
`--would be able to see a distinct flavor of minor-sport prejudice about
this whole thing,' C.T. says, crossing and recrossing his legs as I listen, composed
and staring.
The room's carbonated silence is now hostile. `I think it's time to let the
actual applicant himself speak out on his own behalf,' Academic Affairs
says very quietly. `This seems somehow impossible with you here, sir.'
Athletics smiles tiredly under a hand that massages the bridge of his nose.
`Maybe you'd excuse us for a moment and wait outside, Chuck.'
`Coach White could accompany Mr. Tavis and his associate out to reception,'
the yellow Dean says, smiling into my unfocused eyes.
`--led to believe this had all been ironed out in advance, from the--'
C.T. is saying as he and deLint are shown to the door. The tennis coach
extends a hypertrophied arm. Athletics says `We're all friends and colleagues
here.'
This is not working out. It strikes me that EXIT signs would look to a native
speaker of Latin like red-lit signs that say HE LEAVES. I would yield to the urge
to bolt for the door ahead of them if I could know that bolting for the door is
what the men in this room would see. DeLint is murmuring something to the
tennis coach. Sounds of keyboards, phone consoles as the door is briefly
opened, then firmly shut. I am alone among administrative heads.
`--offense intended to anyone,' Athletic Affairs is saying, his sportcoat
tan and his necktie insigniated in tiny print--'beyond just physical abilities
out there in play, which believe me we respect, want, believe me.'
`--question about it we wouldn't be so anxious to chat with you directly,
see?'
`--that we've known in processing several prior applications through
Coach White's office that the Enfield School is operated, however impressively,
by close relations of first your brother, who I can still remember the
way White's predecessor Maury Klamkin wooed that kid, so that grades'
objectivity can be all too easily called into question--'
`By whomsoever's calling--N.A.A.U.P., ill-willed Pac 10 programs,
O.N.A.N.C.A.A.--'
The essays are old ones, yes, but they are mine; de moi. But they are, yes,
old, not quite on the application's instructed subject of Most Meaningful
Educational Experience Ever. If I'd done you one from the last year, it would
look to you like some sort of infant's random stabs on a keyboard, and to
you, who use whomsoever as a subject. And in this new smaller company, the
Director of Composition seems abruptly to have actuated, emerged as both
the Alpha of the pack here and way more effeminate than he'd seemed at
first, standing hip-shot with a hand on his waist, walking with a roll to his
shoulders, jingling change as he pulls up his pants as he slides into the chair
still warm from C.T.'s bottom, crossing his legs in a way that inclines him
well into my personal space, so that I can see multiple eyebrow-tics and
capillary webs in the oysters below his eyes and smell fabric-softener and the
remains of a breath-mint turned sour.
`. . . a bright, solid, but very shy boy, we know about your being very shy,
Kirk White's told us what your athletically built if rather stand-offish younger
instructor told him,' the Director says softly, cupping what I feel to be a
hand over my sportcoat's biceps (surely not), `who simply needs to swallow
hard and trust and tell his side of the story to these gentlemen who bear no
maliciousness none at all but are doing our jobs and trying to look out for
everyone's interests at the same time.'
I can picture deLint and White sitting with their elbows on their knees in
the defecatory posture of all athletes at rest, deLint staring at his huge
thumbs, while C.T. in the reception area paces in a tight ellipse, speaking
into his portable phone. I have been coached for this like a Don before a
RICO hearing. A neutral and affectless silence. The sort of all-defensive
game Schtitt used to have me play: the best defense: let everything bounce
off you; do nothing. I'd tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made
could be what you hear.
Athletics with his head out from under his wing: `--to avoid admission
procedures that could be seen as primarily athletics-oriented. It could be a
mess, son.'
`Bill means the appearance, not necessarily the real true facts of the matter,
which you alone can fill in,' says the Director of Composition.
`--the appearance of the high athletic ranking, the subnormal scores, the
over-academic essays, the incredible grades vortexing out of what could be
seen as a nepotistic situation.'
The yellow Dean has leaned so far forward that his tie is going to have a
horizontal dent from the table-edge, his face sallow and kindly and no-shit-whatever:
`Look here, Mr. Incandenza, Hal, please just explain to me why we
couldn't be accused of using you, son. Why nobody could come and say to
us, why, look here, University of Arizona, here you are using a boy for just
his body, a boy so shy and withdrawn he won't speak up for himself, a jock
with doctored marks and a store-bought application.'
The Brewster's-Angle light of the tabletop appears as a rose flush behind
my closed lids. I cannot make myself understood. `I am not just a jock,' I say
slowly. Distinctly. `My transcript for the last year might have been dickied a
bit, maybe, but that was to get me over a rough spot. The grades prior to
that are de moi.' My eyes are closed; the room is silent. `I cannot make
myself understood, now.' I am speaking slowly and distinctly. `Call it something
I ate.'
It's funny what you don't recall. Our first home, in the suburb of Weston,
which I barely remember--my eldest brother Orin says he can remember
being in the home's backyard with our mother in the early spring, helping the
Moms till some sort of garden out of the cold yard. March or early April. The
garden's area was a rough rectangle laid out with Popsicle sticks and twine.
Orin was removing rocks and hard clods from the Moms's path as she
worked the rented Rototiller, a wheelbarrow-shaped, gas-driven thing that
roared and snorted and bucked and he remembers seemed to propel the
Moms rather than vice versa, the Moms very tall and having to stoop
painfully to hold on, her feet leaving drunken prints in the tilled earth. He
remembers that in the middle of the tilling I came tear-assing out the door
and into the backyard wearing some sort of fuzzy red Pooh-wear, crying,
holding out something he said was really unpleasant-looking in my upturned
palm. He says I was around five and crying and was vividly red in the cold
spring air. I was saying something over and over; he couldn't make it out
until our mother saw me and shut down the tiller, ears ringing, and came
over to what I was holding out. This turned out to have been a large patch of
mold--Orin posits from some dark corner of the Weston home's basement,
which was warm from the furnace and flooded every spring. The patch itself
he describes as horrific: darkly green, glossy, vaguely hirsute, speckled with
parasitic fungal points of yellow, orange, red. Worse, they could see that the
patch looked oddly incomplete, gnawed-on; and some of the nauseous stuff
was smeared around my open mouth. `I ate this,' was what I was saying. I
held the patch out to the Moms, who had her contacts out for the dirty work,
and at first, bending way down, saw only her crying child, hand out, proffering;
and in that most maternal of reflexes she, who feared and loathed more
than anything spoilage and filth, reached to take whatever her baby held
out--as in how many used heavy Kleenex, spit-back candies, wads of
chewed-out gum in how many theaters, airports, backseats, tournament
lounges? O. stood there, he says, hefting a cold clod, playing with the
Velcro on his puffy coat, watching as the Moms, bent way down to me, hand
reaching, her lowering face with its presbyopic squint, suddenly stopped,
froze, beginning to I.D. what it was I held out, countenancing evidence of
oral contact with same. He remembers her face as past describing. Her
outstretched hand, still Rototrembling, hung in the air before mine.
`I ate this,' I said.
`Pardon me?'
O. says he can only remember (sic) saying something caustic as he limboed
a crick out of his back. He says he must have felt a terrible impending
anxiety. The Moms refused ever even to go into the damp basement. I had
stopped crying, he remembers, and simply stood there, the size and shape of
a hydrant, in red PJ's with attached feet, holding out the mold, seriously,
like the report of some kind of audit.
O. says his memory diverges at this point, probably as a result of anxiety.
In his first memory, the Moms's path around the yard is a broad circle of
hysteria:
`God!' she calls out.
`Help! My son ate this!' she yells in Orin's second and more fleshed-out
recollection, yelling it over and over, holding the speckled patch aloft in a
pincer of fingers, running around and around the garden's rectangle while O.
gaped at his first real sight of adult hysteria. Suburban neighbors' heads
appeared in windows and over the fences, looking. O. remembers me tripping
over the garden's laid-out twine, getting up dirty, crying, trying to follow.
`God! Help! My son ate this! Help!' she kept yelling, running a tight
pattern just inside the square of string; and my brother Orin remembers
noting how even in hysterical trauma her flight-lines were plumb, her footprints
Native-American-straight, her turns, inside the ideogram of string,
crisp and martial, crying `My son ate this! Help!' and lapping me twice
before the memory recedes.
`My application's not bought,' I am telling them, calling into the darkness of
the red cave that opens out before closed eyes. `I am not just a boy who plays
tennis. I have an intricate history. Experiences and feelings. I'm complex.
`I read,' I say. `I study and read. I bet I've read everything you've read.
Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM-drives.
I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it."
My instincts concerning syntax and mechanics are better than your own, I
can tell, with due respect.
`But it transcends the mechanics. I'm not a machine. I feel and believe. I
have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could, if you'd let me, talk
and talk. Let's talk about anything. I believe the influence of Kierkegaard on
Camus is underestimated. I believe Dennis Gabor may very well have been
the Antichrist. I believe Hobbes is just Rousseau in a dark mirror. I believe,
with Hegel, that transcendence is absorption. I could interface you guys
right under the table,' I say. `I'm not just a creatus, manufactured, conditioned,
bred for a function.'
I open my eyes. `Please don't think I don't care.'
I look out. Directed my way is horror. I rise from the chair. I see jowls
sagging, eyebrows high on trembling foreheads, cheeks bright-white. The
chair recedes below me.
`Sweet mother of Christ,' the Director says.
`I'm fine,' I tell them, standing. From the yellow Dean's expression,
there's a brutal wind blowing from my direction. Academics' face has gone
instantly old. Eight eyes have become blank discs that stare at whatever
they see.
`Good God,' whispers Athletics.
`Please don't worry,' I say. `I can explain.' I soothe the air with a casual
hand.
Both my arms are pinioned from behind by the Director of Comp., who
wrestles me roughly down, on me with all his weight. I taste floor.
`What's wrong?'
I say `Nothing is wrong.'
`It's all right! I'm here!' the Director is calling into my ear.
`Get help!' cries a Dean.
My forehead is pressed into parquet I never knew could be so cold. I am
arrested. I try to be perceived as limp and pliable. My face is mashed flat;
Comp.'s weight makes it hard to breathe.
`Try to listen,' I say very slowly, muffled by the floor.
`What in God's name are those . . . ,' one Dean cries shrilly, `. . . those
sounds?'
There are clicks of a phone console's buttons, shoes' heels moving, pivoting,
a sheaf of flimsy pages falling.
`God!'
`Help!'
The door's base opens at the left periphery: a wedge of halogen hall-light,
white sneakers and a scuffed Nunn Bush. `Let him up!' That's deLint.
`There is nothing wrong,' I say slowly to the floor. `I'm in here.'
I'm raised by the crutches of my underarms, shaken toward what he must
see as calm by a purple-faced Director: `Get a grip, son!'
DeLint at the big man's arm: `Stop it!'
`I am not what you see and hear.'
Distant sirens. A crude half nelson. Forms at the door. A young Hispanic
woman holds her palm against her mouth, looking.
`I'm not,' I say.
You have to love old-fashioned men's rooms: the citrus scent of deodorant
disks in the long porcelain trough; the stalls with wooden doors in frames of
cool marble; these thin sinks in rows, basins supported by rickety alphabets
of exposed plumbing; mirrors over metal shelves; behind all the voices the
slight sound of a ceaseless trickle, inflated by echo against wet porcelain and
a cold tile floor whose mosaic pattern looks almost Islamic at this close
range.
The disorder I've caused revolves all around. I've been half-dragged, still
pinioned, through a loose mob of Administrative people by the Comp.
Director--who appears to have thought variously that I am having a seizure
(prying open my mouth to check for a throat clear of tongue), that I am
somehow choking (a textbook Heimlich that left me whooping), that I am
psychotically out of control (various postures and grips designed to transfer
that control to him)--while about us roil deLint, trying to restrain the
Director's restraint of me, the varsity tennis coach restraining deLint, my
mother's half-brother speaking in rapid combinations of polysyllables to the
trio of Deans, who variously gasp, wring hands, loosen neckties, waggle
digits in C.T.'s face, and make pases with sheafs of now-pretty-clearly-superfluous
application forms.
I am rolled over supine on the geometric tile. I am concentrating docilely
on the question why U.S. restrooms always appear to us as infirmaries for
public distress, the place to regain control. My head is cradled in a knelt
Director's lap, which is soft, my face being swabbed with dusty-brown institutional
paper towels he received from some hand out of the crowd overhead,
staring with all the blankness I can summon into his jowls' small
pocks, worst at the blurred jaw-line, of scarring from long-ago acne. Uncle
Charles, a truly unparalleled slinger of shit, is laying down an enfilade of
same, trying to mollify men who seem way more in need of a good browmopping
than I.
`He's fine,' he keeps saying. `Look at him, calm as can be, lying there.'
`You didn't see what happened in there,' a hunched Dean responds
through a face webbed with fingers.
`Excited, is all he gets, sometimes, an excitable kid, impressed with--'
`But the sounds he made.'
`Undescribable.'
`Like an animal.'
`Subanimalistic noises and sounds.'
`Nor let's not forget the gestures.'
`Have you ever gotten help for this boy Dr. Tavis?'
`Like some sort of animal with something in its mouth.'
`This boy is damaged.'
`Like a stick of butter being hit with a mallet.'
`A writhing animal with a knife in its eye.'
`What were you possibly about, trying to enroll this--'
`And his arms.'
`You didn't see it, Tavis. His arms were--'
`Flailing. This sort of awful reaching drumming wriggle. Waggling,' the
group looking briefly at someone outside my sight trying to demonstrate
something.
