Day misses Lenz

The professional ironist caught in single-entendre feeling. Geoffrey Day — the House's AA-debunker, the man of clever paradoxes (112, 066) — is ambushed by a sincere attachment: he misses Randy Lenz, a man he despises, and "would die before admitting" it. But the feeling leaks out sideways, past the mouth that won't say it: "A surprising amount of Day's Recovery Journal is filled with quotations from R. Lenz." The journal is the tell. This is the Crocodile-predicted softening in miniature — the ironist's denial holding at the level of speech while the truth writes itself into the record. Sincerity, for the ironist, arrives unbidden and unwanted (cf. Hal at 036), and its first symptom is an attachment he can neither stop nor confess.