Receding

Loss in this novel is often rendered as a diminishing signal — a voice, a siren, or a gift growing fainter as it withdraws. The image is flagged at the very start with Tavis's voice "receding," recurs with C.T.'s voice, and tolls again as "receding" thunder at DuPlessis's death. Its thematic keystone is the warning about giftedness: "Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever." From there the motif attaches to visual and aural fade — Mario's planned shot of players "reced[ing] into a kind of doomed mist," sirens "achingly far away, and receding," crowd-sounds thinning out, the red-stained reserve rows "receding down the pitch-black pipe." Receding gives the book a physics of loss: the thing you needed is not destroyed so much as it grows quiet and small and keeps going.