The moon

The moon is the face that never turns away — an image the novel loads with lunar timing and low, unwell dread. Its emotional core is the caller who prizes the moon precisely because "it never turns its face away," a line the book answers a page-range later with "Revolving and yet not," and reflects again in the Grief-Therapist who "never once turned his face away." Around this steady countenance cluster darker moods: the Quonset base "like the surface of the moon" where "moon references begin here and recur," "seven moons orbiting a dead planet," and a rising moon that "looks like it doesn't feel very well." The image can also mark ominous slowness, as when Da's door opens "with the implacable slowness of a rising moon." The motif ultimately holds two contradictory promises at once — constancy and sickness, the face that stays and the face that ails.