‘The girl’s father has been calling about admission for her for over two years, Charles said.’
‘He was doing that thing about taking skulls apart and she yelled bloody murder.’
Avril’s laugh’s onset was high-pitched and alarming and distinctive, so now at least C.T. would for sure know the Moms was out here waiting and would wind things up and maybe get to Hal so Hal could go get high in secret. ‘Well good for her,’ Avril said.
The orbit took him around Lateral Alice Moore’s desk in a kind of thick ellipse. Every time his left foot came down he either dipped down or raised up briefly to tip-toe, flexing the ankle. ‘Ten years here and she’ll lose her mind. If she starts at seven she’ll either be ready for the Show at fourteen or by fourteen she’ll start getting that burned-out look that makes you want to wave your hand in front of her face.’
There was the sound of Tavis’s squeaky right Nunn Bush pacing faster, which meant real conclusion. ‘I’m going to predict it’s probably hard to see yourself as a great athlete at this stage, Tina, not being able to see over the net yet, but possibly even harder to see yourself as providing entertainment, engaging people’s attention. As a high-velocity object people can project themselves onto, forgetting their own limitations in the face of the nearly limitless potential someone as young as yourself represents.’
The apple generated tremendous amounts of saliva. ‘He’ll put her in the Show before menses, there’ll be another enormous fuss and high-rental cartridges of a girl no larger than her racquet beating up on hairy Slavic lesbians, and then by fourteen she’ll be like old coal in the bottom of a backyard grill.’ Some old military joke about apples kept running through. Eat the Apple, Fuck the Core. Hal couldn’t remember what it was supposed to signify.
The Moms was snapping her fingers silently and working her forehead. ‘There’s some term for coals reduced to residue after all day in a grill. I’m trying to think.’
Hal hates this. ‘Clinkers,’ he said instantly. ‘From klinker low German and klinckaerd old Dutch, to sound, ring, nominated to substantive around 1769: a hard mass formed by the fusion of the earthy impurities of like coal, iron ore, limestone.’ He hated it that she could even dream he’d be taken in by the aphasiac furrowing and finger-snapping, and then that he’s always so pleased to play along. Is it showing off if you hate it?
‘Clinker.’
‘A grill wouldn’t have clinkers. Charcoal’s refined to burn right down to dust. Clinkers are sort of metallic, I think. See for example the ring-dash-sound etymology.’
‘I like to suspect this is why so many of our older players like to project me into this carnival-barker persona with tiny balance sheets revolving in my eyes, that I’m up-front with every incoming addition to our family that this is where the resources come from for professional tennis, and for the North American junior development system for gifted children who want to scale the heights to professionalism or to a competitive college career, and so ultimately for an Academy like this one’s considerable operating expenses, and for scholarships like the partial one we’re so happy to be able to offer your parents for you.’
‘So then perhaps you’d care to join us for dinner. We’ll also have Ms. Echt if she can stay up that long.’
The core made a very-muffled-cymbal sound in the bottom of Lateral Alice’s wastebasket. ‘I can’t get out of dawns. Wayne and I are supposed to play Slobodan 221 and Hartigan at some corporate-spectacle thing at Auburndale right after lunch.’
‘Have you had Barry speak to Gerhardt about the ankle not getting better?’
‘The clay’ll be good to it. Schtitt knows all about the ankle.’
‘Well best of British luck to you both.’ Avril’s purse looked more like soft luggage than like a purse. ‘May I lend you the key to the kitchen, then.’
It’s always the Moms’s left shoulder Hal looks over, whenever he orbits, and his plans emerged between Avril’s invitations to accept some sort of politeness-act. ‘The Darkness and I were going to blast down the hill and grab something if and when I ever get out of here.’
‘Oh.’
Then he wondered with dread what Stice might have said to her on her way in, re supper. ‘Maybe Pemulis too, I think Pemulis said.’
‘Well do not, under any circumstances, enjoy yourself.’
Echt and Tavis were both standing, now, in there. Their handshake looked, for the first split-second he looked, like C.T. was jacking off and the little girl was going Sieg Heil. Hal thought he was maybe starting to lose his mind. Even the meat of the Granny Smith smelled like perfume.
Three months later, earlier today, before being again summoned, at the dentist’s, the dentist’s office had had a weird sharp clean sweet smell about it, the olfactory equivalent of fluorescent light. Hal had felt the cold stab in the gum and then the slow radial freeze, his face ballooning to become one of the frozen cumuli against the aftershave-blue of the dental wallpaper’s sky. Zegarelli D.D.S. had dry dark green eyes that bulged above his mint-blue mask, as in like olives where eyes should be, as he leaned in to proceed, his dental overhead light’s corona giving him one of those malperspectived medieval halos that seem to stand on end. Even masked, Zegarelli’s breath is infamous — E.T.A.s forced for the first time by their E.T.A. Group Plan to recline below Zegarelli are counselled on how to respire, to inhale when Zegarelli inhales and exhale right back out with him, to avoid doubling the amount of suffering Hal’s already gone through, just today.
Charles Tavis is not a buffoon. The thing that’s keeping things so tensely quiet out here amid all this waiting-room blue is that there are historically at least two Charles Tavises, the three older boys know. The openly cross-sectional and free-associating and arms-waving-on-the-perspectival-horizon dithering hand-wringing Total-Worry persona is really Tavis’s version of social composure, his way of trying to get along with you. But just ask Michael Pemulis, whose sneakers have been on Tavis’s carpet so often they’ve left an unvacuumable impression in the checked Antron: when Tavis loses his composure, when the integrity or smooth function of the Academy or his unquestioned place at the E.T.A. tiller is God forbid threatened, Hal’s openly adjustable uncle becomes a different man, one not to be fucked with. It’s not necessarily pejorative to compare a cornered bureaucrat to a cornered rat. The danger-sign to watch out for is if Tavis suddenly gets very quiet and very still. Because then he seems, perspectivally, to grow. He seems, sitting there, to rush in at you, dopplering in at a whisper. Almost looming over you from across the huge desk. If shit meets administrative fan, kids coming out of his mandible-doored office come out pale and rubbing their eyes, not from tears but from this depth-perspective skewing that C.T. suddenly effects, when there’s shit.
Another alert is when Lateral Alice Moore gets formally buzzed to bring you and the others in, instead of the office doors ever opening from inside, and when she gets up and edges over to show you in like you’re some sort of hat-holding salesman, without once meeting your eye, as if there’s shame. One big family.
The diddle-check seems like it’s degenerated into the girls all getting very excited and exchanging data on what kinds of animals members of their own biologic families either imitate or physically resemble, and Avril’s out of sight and silent and apparently letting them go with it for a while and vent stress. Hal keeps checking for jaw-drool with the back of his hand. Pemulis, in a cyrillic-lettered T-shirt, takes off the hat and looks around himself and makes reflexive tie-straightening movements, taking one last look at his lines on the printout while Axford stands there needing three tries to work the outside door’s knob. Ann Kittenplan, on the other hand, wears an expression of almost regal calm, and precedes them through the inner door like someone stepping down off a dais.
And it also seems somehow sinister that she’s apparently been in here all this time, this Clenette person, one of the nine-month temps from down the hill, pretty-eyed and so black she’s got a bluish cast, with hair ironed straight and t
hen pinned up and the standard E.T.A.-custodial teal-blue zip-upable jumpsuit, emptying Tavis’s personal brass wastebaskets into her big cart with its gray canvas sides. The way she stares at a point just to the side of Hal’s own stare as she and her cart wait at C.T.’s inner door for Hal and the others to be ushered sideways through by Lateral Alice Moore. The cart, like poor Otis Lord’s own game-master’s cart, has a crazy wheel, and clatters a bit even buried in shag, trying to maneuver around Moore as she reverses back along the vestibule’s wall. Neither Schtitt nor deLint is in here, but from the hiss of Pemulis’s inhale Hal can tell that Dr. Dolores Rusk is in the room even before he takes his eyes from a C.T. who’s sitting pulsing with swollen proximity in his seagrass swivel-chair and almost done coolly bending a giant paper clip into a sort of cardioid or else sloppy circle: Tavis’s window-lit shadow now reaches all the way past the StairBlaster to the red-and-gray-fabric ottoman along the east wall, in which sits sure enough Rusk, her hose laddered and face betraying nothing; and then next to her is poor old Otis P. Lord, the Hitachi monitor still over his head like the sallet of some grotesque high-tech knight, slumped and with his sneakers pointing at each other in the blue and black shag, hands in his lap, two crude eye-holes cut into the black plastic casing of the monitor’s base, Lord not meeting Pemulis’s eye, and wicked hanging shards of glass from the screen he fell through pointing — some nearly touching, even — his slim neck and throat, so he has to hold his head very still, despite the heavings of his shallow chest, with the day-shift E.T.A. nurse standing behind him and inclined over the back of the sofa to hold the monitor very carefully in place, the incline producing cleavage which Hal would gladly choose to be the sort of person not to note. Lord’s eyes move to Hal and blink dolefully through the holes, and he can be heard sniffing moistly in there, complexly muffled; and Pemulis is just finishing moving his feet precisely into their familiar impressions in the office carpet when C.T., seeming direly to rise from his chair without getting up, quietly asks the room’s last occupant — the scrubbed young button-nosed urologist in an O.N.A.N.T.A. blazer, severely underdue at E.T.A., seated back in the shadow of the open inner door in the room’s southeast corner, so he’s hidden right behind them from the start and there’s the opportunity for this stagy incriminating-type whirl-and-kertwang-face from Axford and Hal as they hear Charles Tavis addressing the urine expert behind them, asking him very quietly please to close both doors.
PRE-DAWN AND DAWN, 1 MAY Y.D.A.U.
OUTCROPPING NORTHWEST OF TUCSON AZ U.S.A., STILL
‘You can’t say it’s only a U.S. thing,’ Steeply said again. ‘I went through school when multiculturalism was inescapable. We read about the Japanese and Indonesians, for example, having a mythic figure. I forget its name. Oriental myth. It’s a woman covered with long blond hair. Entirely. Her whole body with blond down all over it.’
‘This type of passive temptation, part of it seems to include a felt lack. A perceived deprivation. Orientals are not bodily a hairy culture.’
‘These multicultural Oriental myths always had young Oriental men happening upon her by some body of water combing her body-hair and singing. And they have sex with her. Apparently she’s simply too exotic and intriguing or seductive to resist. Even the young Oriental men who know of the myths can’t resist, according to the myths.’
‘And are rendered paralyzed with stasis by this intimate act,’ Marathe said. When now he dreamt of his father, it was of the two skating, young Marathe and M. Marathe, at a St. Remi-d’Amherst outdoor rink, M. Marathe’s breath visible and his pacemaker a boxy bulge in his Brunswickian cardigan.
‘Killed outright, usually. The pleasure’s too intense. No mortal can stand it. Kills them. M-o-r-t-s.’
Marathe sniffed.
‘The analogous part is how even the ones who know the pleasure of it will kill them, they go ahead anyway.’
Marathe coughed.
Some of the insects flying had multiple pairs of wings and were bioluminescent. They seemed very intent, flying past the outcropping and darting jaggedly off on a course, on their way to something urgent. The sound of them, the insects, made Marathe think of playing cards in the bicycle spokes of the bicycle of a boy with legs. Both men were silent. This is the time of false dawns. Venus moved east away from them. The softest light imaginable seeped into the desert and spread into the strange tan vistas around them, something heating just below the ring of night. His blanket of the lap was covered in burrs and small spiked seeds of some species. The U.S.A. desert began to rustle with life of which most remained hidden. In the American sky, the stars fluttering like banked flames above a low-resolution seepage of glow. But none of the pinkening of genuine dawn.
Both the U.S.A. Office of Unspecified Services and les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents looked forward to these meetings of Marathe and Steeply. They accomplished little. It was their sixth or seventh. Meeting. Steeply had volunteered to be liaison with Marathe’s betrayal, despite language. 222 The A.F.R. believed Marathe functioned as a triple agent, pretending to betray his nation for his wife, memorizing every detail of the meetings with B.S.S. According to Steeply, Steeply’s B.S.S. superiors did not know that Fortier knew that Steeply knew he (Fortier) knew Marathe was here. Steeply held this fact back from his superiors. It satisfied some U.S.A. desire to hold some small thing back from one’s superiors, Marathe felt. Unless Steeply was deceiving Marathe about this. Marathe did not know. M. Fortier did not know Marathe had reached the internal choice that he loved his skull-deprived and heart-defective wife Gertraud Marathe more than he loved the Separatist and anti-O.N.A.N. cause of the nation Québec, making Marathe no better than M. Rodney ‘the God’ Tine. If Fortier knew of this, he would understandably drive a railroad spike through Gertraud’s boneless right eye, killing her and Marathe both.
The real Marathe gestured outward at the glowing but unpink east. ‘A false dawn.’
‘No,’ Steeply said, ‘but your own francophone myth of your Odalisk of Theresa.’
‘L’Odalisque de Sainte Th´ erèse.’ Marathe rarely yielded to the temptation to correct Steeply, whose horrid pronunciation and the syntax as well Marathe could never determine for sure either was or was not an intentional irritant, intended to discomfit Marathe.
Steeply said ‘The multicultural myth being that the Odalisk’s so beautiful that mortal Québecois eyes can’t take it. Whoever looks at her turns into a diamond or gem.’
‘In most versions an opal.’
‘A Medusa in reverse, one might say.’
Both men, well versed in this, mirthlessly laughed. 223
Marathe said ‘The Greeks, they did not fear beauty. They feared ugliness. Hence I think beauty and pleasure, these were not fatal temptations for the Greek type.’
‘Or like a combination of Medusa and Circe, your Odalisk’ said Steeply. He was smoking either his last or one of his purse’s pack’s last cigarettes — the American’s habit to throw the butts off the outcropping had prevented Marathe from counting the consumed butts. Marathe knew that Steeply knew that filters of cigarettes did not biodegrade for the environment. The two men, by this juncture of time, each knew the other.
A hidden bird twittered.
‘The Greek mythic personality, it had also pregnancy by rain and rape by fowl.’
‘And haven’t we come a long way,’ Steeply said ironically.
‘This irony and contempt for selves. These also are part of your U.S.A. type’s temptation, I think.’
‘Whereas your type’s a man of only actions, ends,’ Steeply said, with Marathe could not tell whether irony or maybe not.
The desert floor was brightening by imperceptible degrees, its surface the color of overtanned hide. The saguaro cactus reptile-hued. Potentially young forms in down sleeping bags of coffinous shape were now discernible around the black remains of the night’s bonfire. The air smelled of green wood. A tasteless odor of dust. The distant construction site’s payloaders were urine-colored and appeared
frozen in the middle of various actions. It was still chill. Marathe’s teeth had a palpable film on them, of perhaps a paste of dust, especially the front teeth. No sun’s top arc was appearing, and Marathe could cast no shadow yet on the shale behind them.
Rémy Marathe’s resting pulse rate was very low: no legs to require blood from the heart. He very rarely felt phantom pains, and then only in the stump of the left. All A.F.R.s have enormous arms, particularly upper arms. Marathe was left-handed. Steeply manipulated his cigarette with his left hand and used his right arm to cradle the left elbow. But Marathe knew quite well that Steeply was right-handed. The little wens of his fieldpersona’s electrolysis were now brightly pink against the pallor of Steeply’s face, which appeared both puffy and drawn.
The cloudless sky above the east’s Mountains of Rincon range was the faint sick pink of an unhealed burn. The whole imperceptibly lightening scene of the vistas had a stillness about it that suggested photography. Marathe had long ago placed his watch in his windbreaker’s pocket, to keep from continually checking. Steeply enjoyed imagining that his interface dictated its own period and time; Marathe had chosen to indulge this.
Marathe realized about himself that some of his pretended sniffing was for the purpose of alerting Steeply to the breaking of a silence. ‘You could seat yourself briefly, if you have fatigue. The shoes’ straps…’ He gestured slightly.
Steeply made a show of looking down and prodding at the tan stone’s dust with the toes of his shoe. ‘It looks like there might be things.’
‘I must soon leave.’ Marathe’s hand was imprinted with the texture of the Sterling’s pebbled grip. ‘It has been good to be in the air for a night. Soon I must leave.’
‘Crawling around. The skirt, it makes one sensitive about simply plop-ping down wherever you wish. Possibility of things… crawling up.’ He looked up at Marathe. He appeared sad. ‘I’d never realized.’
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