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. IngersolPs 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.
T’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 Slice’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 betrayal 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 Quebec 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?’