the only monster left: the self that gives nothing away

Hal's grown-up definition of monstrosity is the perfectly sealed person — not the liar you catch but the one from whom nothing whatsoever escapes, no tell, no leak, no signal of the interior at all. It is the theme's nightmare version of the opaque self: a human surface that transmits nothing true and cannot be read, walking among us and raising our children. The chill is that the description fits the mother two rooms away, and, in a different key, the brother describing it. [sweep · shared-ground irony-sincerity]