THE OVAL JOWL OF THE NORTH SEA
A SCREAMING COMES ACROSS THE SKY of an Arizona noon. I am seated in a velveteen office, consciously congruent to the shape of a hard chair, while the evacuation proceeds as theatre. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan, the University’s Director of Composition, stands at the periphery of my focus. He holds a bowl of lather aloft to the V-2 rocket, a new star, nothing less noticeable.

"Introibo ad altare Dei," he intones, his reading glasses rectangular and court-shaped. "You are Harold Incandenza, eighteen, attending the Enfield Tennis Academy, where the glass will fall—soon—a spectacle of a crystal palace."

The Brennschluss Admissions
The white line of the exhaust has stopped its climb. Brennschluss. The end of recruitment. Inside the carriage, Stephen Dedalus sits in silence, surrounded by three Deans who have resolved into place above half-Windsors. This is a cold room, wood-walled, Remington-hung, insulated from administrative sounds by the smell of coal from days far to the past.

"The mockery of it!" says a Dean, removing a page neatly to the bottom of the sheaf. "Your absurd name, an ancient Greek athlete of substantial promise! You didn't really believe you'd be saved by a scholarship, old fellow."

I believe I appear neutral. My fingers are mated into a mirrored series of what manifests as the letter X. Uncle Charles, sitting to my immediate right, is saying that I am 'right up there among the very cream,' while the tennis coach jingles pocket-change. The smell is of remote wings empty all this time, of cold plaster where all the rats have died.

The Banana Breakfast of the Deans
In the kitchen of University Administration, Pirate Prentice is mincing marshmallows with a great isosceles knife. He feels his skull made of metal. He is debating whether to risk scratching the right side of his jaw, where there is a wen, or to simply watch the snotgreen sea clear the harbourmouth.

"Look at the sea," Buck Mulligan says, wiping his razor on a dirty crumpled Nike sneaker. "What does it care about offences or Boys' 18-and-Under Singles?"

The road has been getting narrower, cornering tighter, until all at once we are under the final arch. The University of Arizona tennis squad has profited from the prior matriculation of several evacuees, but there is no way out. The contrail is gone. The light comes percolating in, revealing an assortment of drunken wastrels clutching empty bottles of Vat 69.

The End of the Line
"Did we get all that right, Hal?"

The Dean’s smile has the impermanent quality of a vapor trail striking the top of the skull. The caravan has halted. The evacuees are taken in lots, by elevator—a moving wood scaffold hoisted by old tarry ropes. I am in here. I do not attempt what would feel like a pleasant expression.

The first news you get of it is the blast. Then, if you're still around, you hear the fat woman in the Viking hat begin to sing.