The interview aftermath and the E.R.

Strapped to the gurney outside the ambulance, Hal's narration free- associating from the jet's contrail-as-incision — and then this, a one-sentence memory dropped with no location, no attribution, no follow-up, straight into "I have become an infantophile." A message medium rather than a reflection: the steam has to condense for the finger-written word to resolve, a written surface that only shows its content under the right optical conditions. The raw gives nothing about whose bathroom or whose finger; the sentence's placement between the sky-blade image and the digging-up-the-father's-head flash-forward a few lines later is all the context the scene offers. Catalogued under Mirrors by both Carlisle and ours.