Joelle visits Gately, abiding (p. 857)
What was disconcerting was that when her head was down the veil hung loose at the same vertical angle as when her head was up, only now it was perfectly smooth and untextured, a smooth white screen with nothing behind it. […] When Joelle’s head came back up, the reassuring little hills and valleys of veiled features reappeared behind the screen.
Context
Joelle drops her head to study her flexing thumb and the veil goes from garment to void: same angle, same linen, but with no features pressing through it's suddenly "a smooth white screen with nothing behind it" — the U.H.I.D. membrane shading into the movie screen, blankness as the thing itself. The relief when the "reassuring little hills and valleys" come back is Gately discovering how much face he'd been reading through the cloth all along. The theme's optics in two sentences: what the veil hides is bearable; the possibility that there's nothing to hide is not.