the word neither will say — "That's just a word…"

The theme's central distinction reached and then flinched from: the line between liking something a great great great deal and needing it, which Hal can see is "a whole separate order" of horror but cannot finish the sentence about — Pemulis's "Say the word, Inc" met with silence. And when Hal finally does approach the noun, naming "the part that's dependent or incomplete, the addict," Pemulis takes it away from him with a shrug — "That's just a word" — refusing him the identification the whole Ennet House half of the book is built on. The scene ends on the unsayable and the un-let-said: the two ways the label gets kept at bay, from inside and from the friend.