h and the a and then the second a and the h again then headache becomes a lilting children’s rhymed refrain, something to jump rope to. Look down your shirt and spell attic. One of the teenagers outside the video arcade next to the facilities at Midway had worn a black tee shirt with the words SYMPATHY FOR NIXON TOUR and then a long list of cities in tiny appliqué letters. The teen, who was not on the flight, had then sat briefly across from Sylvanshine in the gate area and had picked at his face with a concentration that wasn’t at all like the absent face-picking and feeling at parts of the face that accompanied concentrated work in the Service. Sylvanshine still dreamed of desk drawers and air ducts stuffed with forms and forms’ edges protruding from grilles over the ducts and the utility closet stacked to the top with Hollerith cards and the Inspections Division lady forcing the door and the cards all falling out on her like McGee’s closet as the whole debacle caught up to them after they fell behind on cross-audit receipts at the Rome REC. He dreamed still of Grecula and Harris disabling the Fornix mainframe with something poured from a thermos into the rear vent as hisses and bits of blue-tinged smoke issued. The teen had had no vocational aura at all; this happened with some people. Ethical standards comprising the exam’s whole first unit, about which there were also many Service jokes. A violation of the profession’s ethical standards most likely would have occurred when: Such was the propellers’ otherworldly sound that Sylvanshine now could hear nothing more than drifting syllables of the exchanges around him. The woman’s claw on the steel armrest between them was a horrible sight that he declined to attend to. Old people’s hands frightened and repelled him. He’d had grandparents whose hands he could remember in their laps looking alien and clawlike. Upon incorporation, Jones, Inc. issues common stock at a price in excess of its par value. It was difficult not to imagine the faces of those whose jobs were writing these questions. What they thought about, what their professional hopes and dreams were. Many of the questions were like little stories with all the human meat left out. On December 1, 1982, Clark Co. leases office space for three years at a monthly rental of $20,000. For a count of one hundred, Sylvanshine tried flexing first one buttock and then the other instead of both buttocks at once, which required concentration and a strange type of noncontrol, like trying to wiggle your ears in the mirror. He tried the inclined-to-the-side thing of stretching out his neck’s muscles on each side very gently and gradually but still got a look from the older lady, who with her dark dress and staved-in face appeared more and more skull-like and frightening and like some type of omen of death or crushing failure on the CPA exam, which two things had collapsed in Sylvanshine’s psyche to a single image of his silently, expressionlessly pushing a wide industrial mop down a corridor lined with frosted-glass doors bearing other men’s names. Even the sight of a mop, rollable bucket, or custodian with his name woven in red Palmer script on the breast pocket of his gray jumpsuit (as at Midway, outside the men’s room whose little yellow sign warned bilingually of wet floors, the cursive name something beginning with M, Morris or Maurice, the man fitted to his job like a man to the exact pocket of space he displaces) now rattled Sylvanshine to the point where precious time was lost before he could even think about how to set up a workable schedule for maximally efficient reviewing for the exam, even mentally, which he did every day. His great weakness was strategic organization and apportionment of time, as Reynolds pointed out at every opportunity, enjoining Claude to for Christ’s sake just take a book off the stack and study instead of sitting there noodling impotently about how best to study. Stuffing returns behind cabinets and into air ducts. Locking desk drawers so filled with cross-reference forms that they could not open anyhow. Hiding things beneath other things in Tingles’ baskets. Reynolds had simply appeared at the Director’s office before the hearing and the whole personal disaster seemingly vanished in some bureaucratic puff of violet smoke and a week later Sylvanshine was unpacking his boxes at Systems in Martinsburg under Dr. Lehrl. The whole thing felt like being in a near traffic fatality avoided by inches and later not being able even to think of the whole thing lest you begin shaking and be unable to function, it had been such a near-disaster. The entire Fats Pod had melted down. The small sound of a simulated bell accompanied the overhead glyph of seat belts and cigarettes lighting up or disappearing; Sylvanshine looked up every time without consciously intending to. In obtaining evidential matter in support of financial statement assertions, the auditor develops specific audit objectives in light of those assertions. An infant keened in some aisle behind him; Sylvanshine imagined the mother simply unbuckling and withdrawing to some other aisle and leaving it there. In Philly, after the frenzy surrounding the introduction of inflation indexes that new templates had to be configured for in ’81, he had been diagnosed with a stress-related pinched nerve in his neck and upper back which the enforced unnatural posture of the tiny narrow 8-B and the deathlike claw on the armrest beside him aggravated if he gave it his attention. It was true: The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you willed yourself to not. Sylvanshine viewed himself as weak or defective in the area of will. Most of what others esteemed or valued in him was unwilled, simply given, like a person’s height or facial symmetry. Reynolds called him weak-minded and it was true. He had a serial memory of their neighbor Mr. Satterthwaite filling in scuffs on his postal uniform’s shoes with a black pen which then before he was aware of it expanded into a whole narrative memory of Mr. and Mrs. Satterthwaite, who were childless and did not if you first met them appear all that friendly or interested in children, nevertheless allowing their backyard to become the de facto HQ for all the children in the neighborhood and even the slapdash and unsound tree house they had allowed Sylvanshine and the Roman Catholic boy with the tic like a chronic wince to try to construct in one of their trees, and Sylvanshine could not recall whether it was because the boy’s family had moved away that the tree house was not completed or whether the move had taken place later and the tree house had simply been too slapdash and sap-soaked to continue with. Mrs. Satterthwaite had had lupus and was often indisposed. Deviation rates, precision limits, stratified sampling. As Dr. Lehrl had explained it, entropy was a measure of a certain type of information that there was no point in knowing. Lehrl’s axiom was that the definitive test of the efficiency of any organization structure was information and the filtering and dissemination of information. Real entropy had zippo to do with temperature. Another effective concentration device was to summon into one’s mind a soothing and low-pressure outdoor scene, either imagined or from memory, which was even more effective if the scene comprised or included a pond lake brook or stream, as water had been proven to have a calming and centering effect on the involuntary nervous system, but try as he might after the buttock exercises Sylvanshine could summon only a jagged primary-color array that looked like a psychedelic poster or something resembling what you see if you’re poked in the eye and then close your eye in pain. The oddness of the word indisposed. Prove that the relation of long-term bond prices to long-term capital gains tax rates is not inverse. He knew who on the plane was in love, who would say they were in love because it was what you were supposed to say, and who would say they were not in love. Reynolds’s own professed take on marriage/family was that from boyhood on he had never liked fathers and had no wish to be one. In three separate venues in today’s various airports Sylvanshine had found himself locking eyes with thirty-year-old men who had infants in high-tech papooselike packs on their backs, their wives with quilted infant-supply bags at their sides, the wives in charge, the men appearing essentially soft or softened in some way, desperate in a resigned way, their stride not quite a trudge, their eyes empty and overmild with the weary stoicism of young fathers. Reynolds would call it not stoicism but acquiescence to some large and terrible truth. The term