the Headmaster’s waiting room (pp. 517–518)

The Tavis taxonomy, three readings stacked. Hal thinks C.T.'s relentless openness is shyness badly hidden; Mario thinks it's a protective shield that betrays a vulnerability you can't help feeling for; Orin and Bain think he's not a person at all but "a sort of cross-section of a person," all interior exposed and nothing behind it. The book gives the childhood proof: the young C.T. drifting cluster to cluster at Québécois gatherings, too self-conscious to join, announcing loudly into every conversational lull that he's "far too self-conscious really to join in here, so I'm just going to lurk creepily at the fringe and listen." The successor's signature is this pathological transparency — a man who preempts every judgment by narrating his own inadequacy first, so that the openness itself becomes the shield. It's the temperamental opposite of the opaque dead king, and, like Avril's doorlessness, it's an exposure that functions as defense.