Day / Gately interface: sincere and frightened

The irony has a sincere and frightened core, and Day names it outright: "I am sincere when I say I'm frightened." Under the rhetorical rigor — Amendments I and IX, the featherless-biped logic, the totalitarian charge — is genuine terror: he wants to believe, tries to, and his intelligence keeps handing him the fallacies that let him not. This is 138's Boone-thesis lived from the inside: the clever seeing-through is a symptom of the wanting-and-fearing, the rigor the precise mechanism by which a frightened man keeps himself out of the thing that might save him. Day's irony is not coldness; it is fear wearing logic — the Day arc's real bottom, and nothing else in the spine states it. And the register point is that Gately hears the fear even when he can't parse the argument — "Your basic decency is why you're whom I bring my thoughts to, Don" — meeting the sincere core the irony is built to hide.