dawn drills; Schtitt’s second world

The paternity question that 071 installed as a joke and an insinuation is here, years on, an interior wound. C.T. stands at the dawn window in leather slippers, and the sleeping shape he watches is rendered in the coldest possible grammar: "the thing it's not entirely impossible he may have fathered." Not a nephew, not even a boy — a thing, a hypothesis, held at exactly the distance a man holds a fact he can neither confirm nor put down. What the passage adds to the succession machinery is dread: Tavis is afraid to wake Mario, afraid of the "terrible calm and accepting knowledge" he half-believes he'd see, and half-suspects is only his own guilt projected. The usurper alone at the window before the household wakes, unable to look directly at the one person who might be his — the Claudius apparatus turned inward and made almost unbearably human.