denial read in the wheels of the chair
The woman in authority smiled that she could see in his playing with the fauteuil’s wheels the addicted struggle between desperation and denial, she said.
Context
The Program's diagnostic eye landing on a man who isn't even an addict: Pat reads "the addicted struggle between desperation and denial" straight off Marathe's nervous fidgeting with the wheelchair, mistaking a spy's calculation for a using addict's ambivalence. The doctrine's central pairing — desperation and denial — stated by the house's authority as a thing she can simply see, the intake worker's practiced read of the body's tells.