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At most other times of day, your certain type of more delicately constituted E.T.A. jr. uses the primitive subdorm hall showers and sinks and avoids the packed locker room at almost all costs. No way Western man ever should have conceived of commodes and hot showers in the same crowded air-space. T. Schacht can clear out most of a steamy locker room just by lumbering into a commode-stall and driving the latch home with a certain purposeful force.

The prorectors have their own showers in a kind of lounge near their rooms in the secondary tunnel, with a Viewer and recliners and a little fridgelet and a dicky-proof door.

When M. M. Pemulis came down to dress for P.M.S at about 1420h.,^b the only people in the locker room were 14-A lobber nonpareil Todd Possalthwaite, hunched and weeping, and Keith Freer, whom Pemulis was to play and who looked in no hurry to get dressed and out there to play, and could very possibly have been the thing that was making Postal Weight weep. The so-called ‘Viking’ was shirtless and had a towel around his neck and was at the mirror ministering to his skin. He had high hard white-blond hair and an extremely muscular neck and lower jaw, with a certain type of protrusive gonions that made his upper face look tapered and sly. His hair always reminded Hal Incandenza of frozen surf, Hal said. Todd Possalthwaite was near-nude and hunched on the bench under his locker, his face in his hands, with its nose’s white bandages visible through spread fingers, weeping softly, shoulders trembling.

Pemulis, who’s Postal Weight’s Big Buddy and sort of lob-and-Eschaton-mentor and genuinely likes the kid, dropped his gear and gave him a sort of male-affectionate fake one-two punch like Think Fast. ‘ ‘s the nose, Todder?’ Like all of them, Pemulis could do his locker’s combination by feel, from months and years of constant combination-doing. He was looking all around himself and the room. Freer made a slight noise when Pemulis asked the Postman if there was anything he could do.

Nothing’s true,’ Postal Weight sobbed, his voice palm-muffled, rocking slightly on the bench. His locker was open and little-boy cluttered. He was wearing only an an unbuttoned little flannel shirt and a Johnson & Johnson jr. jock strap, and had tiny white feet^c and delicate little shell-like toes. He was supposed to be in Donni Stott’s Valley-Map laugher right now, Pemulis knew.

‘What, metaphysical angst at thirteen?’ Pemulis directs the question to the quote-Viking’s reflection’s eye in the mirror. Freer’s back is tapered and uncolloped and for a tennis player’s back has superb latissimal definition but is mottled slightly from repeated applications and defoliations of Pledge, Freer being a profligate Pledge-user because he is complexion-obsessed and has the sort of Nordicular skin that peels instead of tanning. He still has his jeans and loafers on, Pemulis sees. Pemulis keeps waiting for the distinctive attitudinal upswing of two pre-match Tenuate spansules.^d Pemulis’s locker is both full and very precisely ordered, practically alphabetized, like the trunk of an experienced seaman. Disassemblable scale and armamentarium and mood-altering substances used to be concealed in several factory-concealed niches in the special system of niche-riddled portable shelving Pemulis had installed at age 15. Plus small cloth packets of ground cayenne pepper, to foil the always-remotely-possible sniffer-dog, when he was a callow youth. This was before the discovery of the ultimate entrepot above the false ceiling in Subdorm B’s male hallway.