the dead father speaking through the son's phone voice · S6
Another way fathers impact sons is that sons, once their voices have changed in puberty, invariably answer the telephone with the same locutions and intonations as their fathers. This holds true regardless of whether the fathers are still alive.
Context
The telephone made a séance device: Orin dials his estranged family and the voice that answers is, by this rule, their father's, issuing out of Hal's mouth "regardless of whether the fathers are still alive." The channel carries the wrong person, or an extra one, so that even a simple call home routes speech through a third party who is dead. It is the family's whole communicative condition compressed into an aphorism about a ringing phone.