the phone call about Himself’s death (pp. 251–252)
It turns out Rusk and the Moms had begun interviewing top-flight trauma- and grief-counselors for me within hours after it happened. I was shunted directly into concentrated grief- and trauma-therapy.
Context
Here's the operations machinery seen from the inside of its object. Within hours of the death, before anyone has felt anything, Avril and the school psychologist are already interviewing grief-professionals for the thirteen-year-old, and the process gets sited in a building three clicks up the same street the students run past four days a week — near, as Orin puts it, "the old web." The love is real and the surveillance is real and they're the same gesture: a mother who meets her son's trauma by managing it, keeping the treatment inside the family's radius, credentialed and monitored and never once left to happen on its own. What reads as care is indistinguishable from control, and the boy's actual job becomes figuring out how to satisfy the machine that was built, at speed, around him.