Hal and Pemulis on the DMZ and quitting — "In the dream the horror was…"
‘In the dream the horror was that I wasn’t really singing “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” I was really screaming for help. I was screaming like “Help! I’m screaming for help and everybody’s acting as if I’m singing Ethel Merman covers! It’s me! It’s me, screaming for help!” ’
Context
The dream itself: screaming for help and being heard as Ethel Merman covers. The book's clearest dream-foreshadow of scene 001 — Hal producing what he believes is speech while the deans hear subanimalistic noises — and the foreshadow-dream system's terminal image of unreachable interiority; cited by the DMZ-dosing camp as core evidence for its reading of Hal's ending. The space before the closing quote-mark is as the raw has it (nested-quote typesetting).