the plea, answered by silence · S1

Two feet apart, both speaking, and neither received: the son, talking, is driven to refer to himself as "It" ("It speaks… converses with you"), taking on the family's own objectifying grammar at the moment of maximum need to be recognized as a person; the father, unhearing, prays aloud for one conversation that does not end in "you staring, me swallowing." The scene's cruelty is that the son does answer, and the father's last words into it are "Son?" and then, into the silence, "Son?" again.