Hal and Mario in the dark: Pemulis's brass mask

The scene's affect-mask, ours to mine per the reciprocal rule. Hal's admiration for Pemulis over the urinal is admiration for a performance of sincerity so total it becomes unreadable — Pemulis "played the O.N.A.N.T.A. man like a fine instrument," "showed some serious brass under pressure," projecting a "weary pragmatism" the official "found impossible to discount." The "brass mask" is manufactured candor: not a lie you can catch (Hal's field guide fails here — this is the terse-bored subtype he'd just named as a subtype of himself) but affect engineered to be taken as artless. That it's "almost frightening" to Hal — the great reader of tells — is the point: performed sincerity perfected past detection is the exact thing his whole taxonomy can't touch, and he knows it.