the brother he can no longer feel · S1
He used to be able to sort of preverbally know in his stomach generally where Hal was and what he was doing, even if Hal was far away and playing or if Mario was away, and now he can’t anymore. Feel it.
Context
The novel's tenderest register of Hal's interior going dark: Mario, whose whole way of loving is preverbal and bodily, used to be able to feel in his stomach where his brother was, and now the signal is simply gone. It is Hal's vanishing rendered from the outside by the one person attuned enough to notice — a connection that ran below language and needed no words, failing precisely as Hal disappears into himself. Nobody has said anything; the channel just stopped carrying. [sweep · shared-ground irony-sincerity]