Hal and Mario on liars in the dark
‘Then, without any sort of dream-segue, I’m sitting in a cold room, naked as a jaybird, in a flame-retardant chair, and I keep receiving bills in the mail for teeth. A mail carrier keeps knocking on the door and coming in without being invited and presenting me with various bills for teeth.’ […] ‘Only not for any teeth of mine, Boo. The bills are for somebody else’s teeth, not my teeth, and I can’t seem to get the mail carrier to acknowledge this, that they’re not for my teeth.’ […] ‘The bills are in little envelopes with plasticized windows that show the addressee part of the bills. I put them in my lap until the stack gets so big they start to slip off the top and fall to the floor.’
Context
The teeth-dream's second movement, new in this scene: inherited guilt in pure dream-logic — billed forever, and unacknowledgeably, for somebody else's rot. The trims are Mario's interleaved counterpoint (S. Johnson, the Moms's trust), its own kind of gloss: while Hal describes paying for another's teeth, Mario is describing the family's concealments. Between these two speeches Hal starts circling Orin's pathological lying — the somebody whose bills he's holding.