the interview aftermath, E.R.
I think of John N. R. Wayne, who would have won this year’s WhataBurger, standing watch in a mask as Donald Gately and I dig up my father’s head
Context
The Hamlet scaffolding declared outright, in the book's third scene, as Hal is strapped to a stretcher. Flat among the tennis thoughts comes the image that keys the entire novel to the graveyard scene of Hamlet V.i: Hal and Donald Gately exhuming Himself's skull while John Wayne stands sentinel in a mask. Hal is the prince digging up the dead father's head; Gately, the man he has never met, is the gravedigger; Wayne the masked watcher. It is stated with no apparatus, no gloss — just dropped into the interior monologue like a memory of something already done, which fixes the family's whole story as a Hamlet: a son, a buried father whose head must be dug back up, and the truth that will only come out of the ground. Everything the anthology gathers about this family is downstream of this one sentence naming the frame.