Hal at the Inner Infant meeting (pp. 802–803)
leaving him and his brother with Hispanic nannies while they devoted themselves to their jobs and various types of psychotherapy and support groups. […] by the time he was eight they were gone altogether, dead, smooshed by a dysfunctionally falling radio traffic helicopter
Context
The Bains as another mirror-family panel, the anti-Incandenza control's control. Kevin Bain — brother of Marlon Bain, the outside witness whose letters (n269) audit the Incandenza system from the closest range — turns out to come from a family that is the Incandenzas' photographic negative: parents so absent they farmed the boys out to nannies and gave themselves to careers and endless therapy, then died on the way to Couples Counselling. Where the Incandenza damage is delivered by suffocating over-presence and high-volume love, the Bain damage is delivered by evacuation, and both produce grown men who are wrecked. The book keeps building these paired households on the margins of the main system — Joelle's pressure-cooker, Stice's loved-to-distraction folks, the evacuated Bains — so that the Incandenza pathology reads not as bad luck but as one setting on a dial the whole culture is turning.