the locker room; Big Buddies (pp. 101–102)

The family written on three sons' bodies, sorted like the outcome of a genetic contest. Orin "got the Moms's Anglo-Nordo-Canadian phenotype" — the light eyes, the posture, the flexibility. Hal alone carries the father's ethnic look: "Hal is the only extant Incandenza who looks in any way ethnic," inheritor of the high Pima cheekbones and dark coloring that made the young Himself look ethnic too — "Himself had looked ethnic, but he isn't extant." And Mario, third, "doesn't seem to resemble much of anyone they know." So the marriage's mismatch (020's May–December union) replays in each pregnancy as "chromosomatic war," and its results divide the sons into a system: the mother's son, the dead father's son, and the son who belongs to no one's lineage at all. Hal's most quietly haunted fact sits inside the joke — he is the one who wears the face of the extinct father, the living copy of a man no longer extant, carrying the dead king's features into every mirror.