three knocks, three ways of not connecting

quote

Hal told him photosynthesizing and then didn’t say anything else until Troeltsch went away.

Context

Three heads appear at Hal's door and the scene rings three changes on failed contact: banter that deflects (Troeltsch), private code-shtick between intimates (Pemulis), and finally pure wordless mutual regard (Wayne), each gap measured out in the breaths Hal is privately counting. Performance of okay-ness is Hal's only outbound channel, and it shades by degrees into silence — the horizontal, sunlit, breath-counting inwardness that the last hundred pages of his life will become.

Quoted from

Scene 109: lenz coked monologue greenquote spans into an adjacent scene's pages
Scene 110: hal photosynthesizingquote spans into an adjacent scene's pages
Scene 111: lenz cult lore concavityquote spans into an adjacent scene's pages

In anthology

Communication and Solipsismsupporting