Hal in the Pump Room (pp. 50–53)

Here is the pressure Hal's whole secret life is calibrated against. Tavis and Rusk have privately noted that among Avril's uncomplaining phobias is an absolute "dread of hiding or secrecy in all possible forms with respect to her sons" — and knowing this, the scene reframes Hal's elaborate underground drug ritual as a rebellion aimed with surgical precision at the one thing his mother cannot bear. His secrecy isn't incidental to the getting-high; "a bigger secret is that he's as attached to the secrecy as he is to getting high," and the No-One-Must-Know compulsion "is almost irresistible in its force," origin unknown to him. The reader is handed the origin the son can't see: raised by a mother phobic about concealment, Hal has built his private self entirely out of concealment, crawling on all fours through sealed tunnels to do the one unwitnessable thing. The mother's deepest dread and the son's deepest compulsion are keyed to the identical lock.