the one channel that opens is the boy everyone overlooks — "If nobody's really in there, there's…" · S5
If nobody's really in there, there's nothing to be shy about. That's why bullshit often tends to drop away around damaged listeners, deep beliefs revealed, diary-type private reveries indulged out loud; and, listening, the beaming and bradykinetic boy gets to forge an interpersonal connection he knows only he can truly feel, here.
Context
The book's rare working channel runs precisely through the boy the world does not fully register: Mario's visible damage makes people assume nobody is really in there, and so the guardedness drops and the truth gets spoken around him. What looks like being overlooked is the exact condition under which real contact becomes possible, and Mario, listening, forges the connection nobody else can. It is the inverse of Hal's "I am in here": here, being taken for empty is what lets another person fill the air with what they actually believe.