the voice heard as weeping, the face read as mirth — "My voice had been neutral and…" · S1

The gap that opens the whole novel goes clinical here, twice in one pre-dawn: Hal's flat, neutral voice reaches Stice as crying, and, hours later, the face Hal believes composed reaches Kenkle as helpless, doubled-over hilarity — while inside Hal feels nothing of the sort and cannot, when he tries, produce the somber expression he intends. The output is not just unheard but inverted en route, dread read as mirth, calm heard as tears, exactly as the admissions-room catastrophe will one day render it. The self and its broadcast have come apart, and Hal is the last to know what he's transmitting. [sweep · shared-ground the-body-tennis]