Poor Tony's seizure (pp. 306–307)

A hallucinated memory that announces itself as invention — the next lines are "That had never happened. The largest-print headline said PUSH." Poor Tony, seizing on a subway-car floor, has already thought of "gaffed fish"; now his obstetrician father leans in, gowned and gloved for a delivery, to read the newsprint a wrapped fish wears, and the fish's biggest headline turns out to be the delivery-room command. That word is the hinge into a full birth hallucination: Tony on his back in the widening "stirrups of light," bearing down to PUSH, the father crouched to receive what comes out — the son hallucinating his own birth with the man who mourned him as the one working the delivery, himself the gaffed fish being brought in. When the gloved fingers reach into his mouth to retrieve the tongue he's swallowed, he bites them "clean off," putting "rubber-wrapped meat" in his mouth again; the father's head bursts into needled color. And the whole horror funnels to one shame: "his last worry was that red-handed Poppa could see up his dress, what was hidden." The father who once decided what his son's body was is given, in the convulsion, the final look — the son delivered back into the father's hands only to be exposed by them. Obstetrics and disowning collapse into a single image: the man who brings you into the world and the man who can't stand what you are, gloved and leaning in.