the smile that arrives as a grimace — "Is Hal all right, Chuck?' Athletic…"

The mechanism caught in the act: Hal deliberately assembles what he intends as a smile and aims it around the room, and what lands is a grimace that reads as pain. The output is not merely unheard, it is inverted en route, so that his effort to be pleasant is received as suffering. The panic behind the composed face ("my chest bumps like a dryer") never reaches the surface either, so both the feeling and the mask fail to transmit at once.