Hal supine in V.R.5; Pemulis and the lab

Flat on the floor in anhedonic collapse, Hal keeps circling his father's death, and the raw shows exactly how he can approach it: only sideways, through detached physical trivia. His one retrievable image of the burial isn't grief but a connoisseur's note on soil texture — the grave-mound "airy and risen and plump, like dough." This is the mute figurant-son of scene 162 seen from the inside: the boy who can't open his mouth also can't feel his way to the loss directly, so he registers his father's funeral as a fact about dirt. The father who spent his last months building a toy to crack the son open lies under a mound Hal can only describe like a baker; the distance the wraith grieved is here, load-bearing, in the son's own narration.