Hal waiting outside Tavis's office
Like many gifted bureaucrats, Hal’s mother’s adoptive brother Charles Tavis is physically small in a way that seems less endocrine than perspectival. His smallness resembles the smallness of something that’s farther away from you than it wants to be, plus is receding.
Context
The catalogued L-hit's scene-side anchor: Tavis's smallness diagnosed in optical rather than glandular terms — "less endocrine than perspectival," the smallness of a receding object — and the raw hangs endnote 218 on "receding" (marker stripped per convention). The sighting text proper is n.218's "Objects In Mirror" gloss: the federal rearview-mirror imprint Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, which so disconcerted Incandenza — the Meniscus/Latrodectus rearview-mirror fortune's own warning label read back onto C.T.'s person. That gloss lives at endnote n218; quoted at its own entry, cross-referenced here. The scene raw's contribution is the framing itself: a character described as a mirror-image, complete with the mirror's mandated disclaimer. Stice plays the joke's other half shortly after, shielding his eyes in a horizon-scan whenever Tavis heaves into view, "seeming to recede even as he bears down."