Mario's birth & defects: Mario floats, for Hal

The ironist-in-training secretly reveres the irony-free. Hal "almost idealizes Mario, secretly" — and the secrecy is the tell. Where others burned at birth "curl up in their fire," Mario "floats," and Hal, who cannot say a plain word to a grief-counselor or his own brother, holds this un-ironic sibling as the thing he most admires and "fears his opinion more than probably anybody except their Moms's." That the admiration must be secret is the exact condition scene 132 will name: in this family and this culture, loving the sincere, unhip, un-defended thing is itself embarrassing, something you can only do behind the back of your own irony. Hal's reverence for Mario is sincerity kept in the closet.