Hal and Mario on the Moms and sadness — "I don’t get how you couldn’t…"
‘I don’t get how you couldn’t feel like you believed, today, out there. It was so right there. You moved like you totally believed.’ ‘…’ ‘How do you feel inside, not?’ ‘Mario, you and I are mysterious to each other. We countenance each other from either side of some unbridgeable difference on this issue. Let’s lie very quietly and ponder this.’
Context
Midnight in the brothers' room, after a match Hal won so beautifully Mario is sure he must have believed in something out there. Mario's question — how does it feel inside, not believing — gets a typographic silence and then a deflection dressed as tenderness: the earliest clean look at the hollow under Hal's wit.