the mattress, 1963 — "Areas that gibber and squeak,’ my…"
‘Areas that gibber and squeak,’ my father said, ‘until we both feel as if we’re being eaten by rats.’
Context
The book routes the Hamlet ghost-omen straight through a squeaking mattress. "Gibber and squeak" is lifted from the play's first scene — Horatio recalling how the sheeted dead "did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets" before Caesar fell — and here James Sr. pins the phrase to his and his wife's marriage bed, a bed that at night breeds "boiling hordes of gibbering squeaking ravenous rapacious rats." The haunting is domestic and marital: the ghost-language attaches not to a battlement but to the place the parents sleep, the bed the wife kept "for sentimental value" and the husband wants torn apart. Three generations before Hal finds his father in the microwave, the family's founding trouble is already spoken in Hamlet's own words, and it's already located in a marriage.