followed by handicapped people
in the distance I could swear he’s got on some kind of domino-mask. And now everywhere I go the last several days there seems to be a statistically improbable number of wheelchaired figures around, lurking, somehow just a little too nonchalantly.
Context
The A.F.R. surfaces in the novel's most casual possible register — as Orin's paranoid anecdote about burly young men in wheelchairs turning up "three in an hour" wherever he goes. He gets every observable detail right (they are not old, they are too fit, one wears a domino-mask, they loiter "just a little too nonchalantly") and the interpretation exactly wrong, and Hal helpfully supplies the cover story the watchers could only dream of: "Very shy fans, possibly? Some club of leg-dysfunctional people" obsessed, in shy-fan fashion, "with one of the first North American sports figures people think of in connection with the word leg?" A real surveillance operation is being conducted in plain sight on the book's vainest man, and the tail is invisible precisely because both brothers file it under celebrity nuisance.