Hal at the Inner Infant meeting (pp. 808–809)
his older brother’s doubles partner’s older brother down on all fours on a Dacronyl rug, crawling, hampered because one arm was holding his bear to his chest, so he sort of dipped and rose as he crawled on three limbs toward Hal and the needs-meeter behind him, Bain’s knees leaving twin pale tracks in the carpet and his head up on a wobbly neck and looking up and past Hal, his face unspeakable.
Context
The scene's terminal image is the pleasure-death pole made literal: a grown man, MBA and Simulated-Reality tycoon, reduced to an infant crawling across a carpet clutching a teddy bear, face "unspeakable." This is the attaché-in-diapers rendered as a men's-movement exercise — the adult regressed all the way back to the crib, seeking to be held, the endpoint of a culture that trains its members to wait passively for their needs to be magically met. It rhymes with everything the Entertainment does to a viewer: the self dismantled back to pre-verbal infancy, wanting only to be nurtured and held, the body on all fours and the mouth open. Hal watches, praying not to be recognized, seeing the regression as spectacle — which is its own quiet horror, the pleasure-death pole staged as something you attend and observe.