the one hand that takes the request literally — "Mario had extended his clawlike hand…" · S5

Nine months of the appeal misfiring, and then the antidote arrives in the one person constitutionally unable to run the anti-contact defense: Mario, alone and fourteen and "largely clueless about anti-stem defensive strategies," simply hears "touch me" as touch me and shakes the filthy hand. The passage's whole moral weight sits on who does the receiving — not a licensed or worldly adult, but the handicapped kid who never learned the reflex of not-touching — which makes plain that getting through is less a technique than a kind of unguardedness the healthy have trained out of themselves. [sweep · shared-ground addiction-recovery]