the tennis-court dream

Hal dates his own drug use with a strange, half-sealed clause: he held off until nearly sixteen because of "certain vows early on concerning fathers and differences." The vow is never spelled out, but its shape is legible — a resolution, made watching his father drink Wild Turkey at dawn, to be different from the father on exactly that axis. And the sentence that announces the vow is the same sentence that records its loophole: he stayed off the substance the father died of and went straight to another one, so the vow against becoming his father becomes the mechanism by which a differently shaped compulsion installs itself. "Differences" is doing quiet, terrible work there. (The dream that follows — the Moms's white umbrella "in total unconditional support," the unseeable opponent, the impossibly complex court — is mother-and-self material for other themes; the dyad content is the vow.)