Mario’s openly jejune version of his late father’s take on the rise of O.N.A.N. and U.S. Experialism unfolds in little diffracted bits of real news and fake news and privately-conceived dialogue between the architects and hard-choice-makers of a new millennial era:
GENTLE: Another piece of pre-tasted cobbler, J.J.J.C.?
P.M. CAN.: Couldn’t. Stuffed. Having trouble breathing. I would not say no to another beer, however. GENTLE: … P.M. CAN.: … GENTLE: So we’re sympatico on the gradual and subtle but inexorable disarmament and dissolution of NATO as a system of mutual-defense agreements. P.M. CAN. [Less muffled than last scene because his surgical mask gets to have a prandial hole]: We are side by side and behind you on this thing.
Let the EEC pay for their oown defendings henceforth I say. Let them foot some defensive budgets and then try to subsidize their farmers into undercutting NAFTA. Let them eat butter and guns for their oown for once in a change. Hey? GENTLE: You said more than a mouthful right there, J.J. Now maybe we can all direct some cool-headed attention to our own infraternal affairs.
Our own internal quality of life. Refocusing priorities back to this crazy continent we call home. Am I being dug?
P.M. can: John, I am kilometers ahead of you. I happen to have my Term-In-Office-At-A-Glance book right with me here. Now that the big frappeurs are being put doown, we are wondering what is the date I can be pencilling in for the removals of NATO ICBM frappeurs from Manitoba.
GENTLE: Put that pencil away, you good-looking Canadian. I’ve got more long shiny trailer-rigs full of large men with very short haircuts and white suits than you can shake a maple leaf at heading for your silos right this very. Those complete totalities of Canada’s strategic capac-ity’ll be out of your hair toot sweet.
P.M. CAN: John, let me be the first world leader to call you a statesman.
GENTLE: We North Americans have to stick together, J.J.J.C., especially now, no? Am I off-base? We’re interdependent. We’re cheek to jowl.
P.M. can: It is a smaller world, today.
GENTLE: And an even smaller continent.
This segues into an entr’acte, with continent squeezed in for world in ‘It’s a Small World After All,’ which enjambment doesn’t do the rhythm section of doo-wopping cabinet girls a bit of good, but does usher in the start of a whole new era.
Though can any guru be held to a standard of like 100 % exemption from the human pains of stunted desire? No. Not 100 %. Regardless of level of transcendence, or diet.
Lyle, down in the dark Interdependence Day weight room, sometimes recalls an E.T.A. player from several years back whose first name was Marlon and whose last name Lyle never to his knowledge learned.[152]
The thing about this Marlon was that he was always wet. Arms purling, T-shirt darkly V’d, face and forehead ever gleaming. Orin’s Academy doubles partner. It had had a lemony, low-cal taste, the boy’s omniwetness. It wasn’t exactly sweat, because you could lick off the forehead and more beads instantly replaced what you’d taken. None of real sweat’s frus-tratingly gradual accretion. The kid was always in the shower, always doing his best to stay clean. There were powders and pills and electrical appliques. And still this Marlon dripped and shone. The kid wrote accomplished juvenile verses about the dry clean boy inside, struggling to break the soggy surface. He shared extensively with Lyle. He confessed to Lyle one night in the quiet weight room that he’d gone in for high-level athletics mostly to have an excuse of some sort for being as wet as he was. It always looked like Marlon had been rained on. But it wasn’t rain. It’s like Marlon hadn’t been dry since the womb. It’s like he leaked. It had been a tormenting but also in certain ways halcyon few years, in the past. A tormentingly unspecific hope in the air. Lyle had told this boy everything he had to tell.
It’s raining tonight, though. As so often happens in autumn below the Great Concavity, P.M. snow has given way to rain. Outside the weight room’s high windows a mean wind sweeps curtains of rain this way and that, and the windows shudder and drool. The sky is a mess. Thunder and lightning happen at the same time. The copper beech outside creaks and groans. Lightning claws the sky, briefly illuminating Lyle, seated lotus in Spandex on the towel dispenser, leaning forward to accept what is offered in the dark weight room. The idle resistance-machines look insectile in the lightning’s brief light. The answer to some of the newer kids’ complaints about what on earth Lyle can be doing down there at night in a locked empty weight room is that the nighttime weight room is rarely empty. The P.M. custodians Kenkle and Brandt do lock it up, but the door can be dickied by even the clumsiest insertion of an E.T.A. meal-card between latch and jamb. The kitchen crew always wonders why so many meal-cards’ edges always look ravaged. Though the idle machines are scary and the room smells somehow worse in the dark, they come most at night, the E.T.A.s who are on to Lyle. They hit the saunas out by the cement stairs until they’ve got enough incentive on their skin, then they lurk, purled and shiny, in towels, by the weight room door, waiting to enter one by one, sometimes several E.T.A.s, dripping in towels, not speaking, some pretending to have other business down there, lurking in the eye-averted attitudes of like patients in the waiting room of an impotence clinic or shrink. They have to be real quiet and the lights stay off. It’s like the administration’ll turn a blind eye as long as you make it plausible to do so. From the dining hall, whose east wall of windows faces Comm.-Ad., you can hear very muffled laughter and kibitzing and the occasional scream from Mario’s Interdependent puppet thing. A quiet slow small stream of yellow-slickered wet-shoed migrations back and forth between West House and the weight room — people know the slow parts, the times to duck out and go very briefly down to Lyle, to confer. They dicky the lock and go in one by one, in towels. Proffer beaded flesh. Confront the sorts of issues reserved for nighttime’s gurutical tête-à-tête, whispers made echoless by rubberized floors and much damp laundry.
Sometimes Lyle will listen and shrug and smile and say ‘The world is very old’ or some such general Remark and decline to say much else. But it’s the way he listens, somehow, that keeps the saunas full.
Lightning claws the eastern sky, and it’s neat in the weight room’s dark because Lyle is in a slightly different position and forward angle each time he’s illuminated through the window up over the grip/wrist/forearm machines to his left, so it looks like there are different Lyles at different ful-gurant moments.
LaMont Chu, glabrous and high-gloss in a white towel and wristwatch, haltingly confesses to an increasingly crippling obsession with tennis fame. He wants to get to the Show so bad it feels like it’s eating him alive. To have his picture in shiny magazines, to be a wunderkind, to have guys in blue I/SPN blazers describe his every on-court move and mood in hushed broadcast cliches. To have little patches with products’ names sewn onto his clothes. To be soft-profiled. To get compared to M. Chang, lately expired; to get called the next Great Yellow U.S. Hope. Let’s not even talk about video magazines or the Grid. He confesses it to Lyle: he wants the hype; he wants it. Sometimes he’ll pretend a glowing up-at-net action shot he’s clipping out of a shiny magazine is of him, LaMont Chu. But then he finds he can’t eat or sleep or sometimes even pee, so horribly does he envy the adults in the Show who get to have up-at-net action shots of themselves in magazines. Sometimes, he says, lately, he won’t take risks in tournament matches even when risks are OK or even called for, because he finds he’s too scared of losing and hurting his chances for the Show and hype and fame, down the road. A couple times this year the cold clenched fear of losing has itself made him lose, he believes. He’s starting to fear that rabid ambition has more than one blade, maybe. He’s ashamed of his secret hunger for hype in an academy that regards hype and the seduction of hype as the great Meph-istophelan pitfall and hazard of talent. A lot of these are his own terms. He feels himself in a dark world, inside, ashamed, lost, locked in. LaMont Chu is eleven and hits with two hands off both sides. He doesn’t mention the Eschaton or having been punched in the stomach. The obsession with future-tense fame makes all else pale. His wrists are so thin he wears his watch halfway up his forearm, which looks sort of gladiatorial.