at the party and not really there — "the expanding white V of utter…" · S4

The scene's first sentence is the theme in nine words and also the literal plan: veiled in a director's-chair lap at a party thrown in her own former apartment, Joelle is present in body and wholly absent otherwise, already tuned to the silence that comes after everyone leaves. To be somewhere and not there, to occupy a room full of people while sealed entirely outside it, is both her condition tonight and the thing she has decided to make permanent.