Gately staff snippets: the suitcase paradox
Geoff D. and Nell G. are out in the living room going around to all the new people asking them to think about if their Higher Power is omni-potent enough to make a suitcase that’s too heavy for him to lift.
Context
Geoffrey Day, the House's professional ironist, deploys a clever theological paradox on the exact people least able to afford it — and it genuinely tortures the skittery newcomer Tingley, found "sitting in the linen closet with his legs sticking out… smoke coming out his ears… going like He Can but He Can't but He Can." This is the precise inverse of 104's leg-joke: there, absurdity-on-faith carried a truth into a willing listener; here, cleverness-as-weapon jams the un-clever faith a newcomer's recovery depends on. Irony is shown at its most harmful not as fashion but as sabotage — the smart paradox wielded against the machinery of belief, a "negative thing Day's doing" that Staff has to intervene on. Wit as a form of harm.