Hal supine, the blizzard, Accomplice!, the fatherly talk (pp. 948–949)
He sat in that chair throughout the whole storm, sipping brandy from a one-handed snifter, his long legs not quite covered by a plaid blanket. His legs had seemed to me almost endlessly long back then.
Context
Hal's earliest clear image of his father is of the man disappearing into an obsession right in front of him. During the '98 blizzard, months after E.T.A. opened, Himself sat at the living-room window aiming "nondigital cameras at the mounting snow," and the film-thing that would consume the rest of his life — and become, later, the only channel through which his sons could reach him — started there. The raw lays out the pattern coldly: "he remained obsessed with something until he became successful at it, then transferred his obsession to something else," military optics to annular to entrepreneurial to tennis to film. The one tender residue is a shared gesture — he let Mario and Hal put lenses in their eyes to squint and hold, imitating Schtitt — but even that is the father handing the boys the instrument of the obsession that's taking him away from them. Hal watches the endlessly-long legs under the blanket and is already, as a small child, watching from the outside.