the call ends by aiming the channel away — "Hal said, holding the phone down…" · S1

When Orin at last asks the one direct, caring question of the whole sixteen-page call, whether any of this hurt him, Hal answers by dissociating into fetal-biology trivia and then holds the phone down against his clipping toenails, routing the channel physically away from himself. The most intimate exchange in the book ends with one brother literally aiming the line at his own foot, a connection that ran for sixteen pages of shtick and superstition and forensics and never once, at any point, actually connected.