Hal’s teeth-dream; Mario and WYYY (pp. 449–450)
Mario’s great iron bed was empty and made up tight, all five pillows neatly stacked.
Context
The brothers' shared room with one bed empty and made up tight is the scene's quiet family-system image: Mario has decamped to HmH for nights, sleeping on an air mattress in front of C.T.'s receiver, agitated to an un-Mario degree over a radio host's disappearance. And the family's response is exactly calibrated to the theme — Hal, Schtitt, and the Moms have all "remarked" his odd mood, remarked being the operative verb. In a household organized around not-overstepping, distress registers as something you note rather than something you enter; the adults observe the most agitated the least-agitatable person has ever been, and the register stays at observation. It rhymes with the dream Hal has just woken from, where everyone sees his teeth crumbling and looks at their watch, no one willing to confront him with the thing that's plainly wrong.