Hal and Mario on liars (pp. 771–772)

The sibling system as a product of the family's information regime. In the same childhood scene, Orin picks up the ringing dog-phone, barks into it like a dog, hangs up — a cruelty aimed at the mother's love-ritual — and then coerces his little brothers into covering for him: shrug, act like Avril's "minus cards from her deck" when she asks about the bark, or get Indian Rub-Burns "down both arms." So the family that officially runs on total open-lines trust is, underneath, a place where the eldest lies "with a really pathological intensity" and enforces a code of silence on the younger boys with physical threat. The trust-ideology and the coerced cover-up aren't opposites here; the first is the public surface the second operates beneath. Orin is the system's lying reproduced in a child, already teaching his brothers to hide things from the mother who trusts them too much to check.