the opaque channel and the static it triggers — "it had never occurred to him…"
it had never occurred to him to consider whether Orin was ever doing the same thing. This induced a spell of involuted marijuana-type thinking that led quickly, again, to Hal's questioning whether or not he was really all that intelligent.
Context
The brothers' phone call runs on performance from both ends, Hal lying recreationally, and the one moment he glimpses that the channel might be symmetric, that Orin could be doing to him exactly what he does to Orin, it does not open the line but seals it: the thought spirals into involuted marijuana-thinking that turns him inward onto his own intelligence and away from the call entirely. Even the medium leaves him uneasy for reasons he can't locate, the telephone after a secret high a source of static he cannot name.