Mario's birth and body — "Or that he’s slow, Hal’s brother…"
Or that he’s slow, Hal’s brother is, technically, Stanford-Binet-wise, slow, the Brandeis C.D.C. found—but not, verifiably not, retarded or cognitively damaged or bradyphrenic, more like refracted, almost, ever so slightly epistemically bent, a pole poked into mental water and just a little off and just taking a little bit longer, in the manner of all refracted things.
Context
The cognitive half of the dossier, and the book's most careful piece of disability language: the clinical categories are raised and then verifiably refused, replaced with the family's own optics vocabulary — refraction, a bend in the medium, "in the manner of all refracted things." Slow as a property of light, not a deficit.