Hal's confession to Mario
‘Now you’re not on your side anymore, Hal, I can see. When you’re on your back you don’t have a shadow.’ […] ‘I’m sorry if you’re sad, Hal. You seem sad.’ ‘I smoke high-resin Bob Hope in secret by myself down in the Pump Room off the secondary maintenance tunnel. I use Visine and mint toothpaste and shower with Irish Spring to hide it from almost everyone. Only Pemulis knows the true extent.’
Context
Pre-dawn, the brothers' beds: Mario names the sadness, and Hal answers with the drug — the confession as tacit agreement that the Bob Hope and the sadness are the same subject, exactly the substitution Avril described three scenes earlier. The horizontal position that elsewhere marks Hal's decline is, this once, what makes truth possible.