the boys' shower room (pp. 103–104)

A second son carrying a second paternal bequest, this one in the gut. Schacht's Crohn's (and the gout it somehow spun off) is named outright as inheritance from "his ulcerative-colitic dad" — the body itself as the thing fathers hand down, no gesture or lesson required. It's the same channel as Hal's inherited dental problems (154) and the dipsomania of 013: in this book what passes father to son is rarely wisdom and often a defect, a disease, a weakness lodged in the flesh. Texture, but it thickens the theme's argument that paternity is mostly a matter of what you're stuck with.