J.O.I.'s father's garage monologue — "Can you see I was giving…"
Can you see I was giving it all I had? That I was in there, out there in the heat, listening, webbed with nerves? A self that touches all edges, I remember she said.
Context
The monologue's naked center — "That I was in there" is the verbatim ancestor of Hal's p. 3 "I am in here" — carried by a remembered voice: the mother's phrase, preserved across decades and produced as evidence. Memory as testimony, summoned to prove to a ten-year-old that the speaker once existed and was worth seeing.