face to face, and nothing crosses; the vow to try anyway · S5
he has absolutely nothing in his huge square head to Identify with her with or latch onto or say in encouraging reply, and for an instant the Provident cafeteria seems pin-drop silent, and his own heart grips him like an infant rattling the bars of its playpen
Context
The theme at its most naked: a man directly facing another person, wanting to answer, and finding the whole cavern of his head empty of anything that will cross the gap — the veil in front of him going blank as a screen onto which his own dread projects a grinning mask. And the scene's answer to it is not a technique but a vow: Gately settles back in "asking silently for help to be determined to try to really hear or die trying." Really hearing is set out as the one thing worth staking a life on, precisely because it so reliably fails.