Hal vs. Stice, the bleacher talk (p. 682)

The one time a son's own voice about JOI surfaces, it arrives thirdhand and clinical. Steeply relays that "the son described his father as quote 'genre-dysphoric'" — Hal's characterization, quoted by a spy to a prorector, who replies "This does not sound like Hal Incandenza." Even the son's intimate word for the father reaches the scene as reported speech, its provenance doubted in the same breath. It's the dyad's absence made total: the father unknowable to strangers, and now the son's knowledge of him also floating free of the son, a quotation nobody can quite attach to the boy who supposedly said it. The Incandenza father-son bond exists in this scene only as contested hearsay about hearsay.