the I.-Day-Eve call: 'Why not tell the damn truth?'

Hal as truth-forcer, playing Gately to Orin's Day. All through the call Hal punctures the elaborate political co-pondering as the screen it is — "Whom do you think this is really about? Can you be that sick that you can't even admit it over the fucking phone?" — trying to strip the fluent evasion down to the single-entendre facts (the Moms, the Helen Subject, Orin's own need). But the truth-forcing is itself conducted at one remove: Hal's native register is armor too, the ceaseless punning ("I'm pleased to call you a sap whenever you like"), the "Subject/obverse" needling, the "E Unibus Pluram and so on" ironic greeting. Neither brother can quite sit in the plain thing — one evades with Strategy, the other demands the truth from behind his own wall of jokes.