Hal's Year of Glad flash-forward

The novel's endpoint tableau, dropped in on page 16, and it is built out of the theme's two primitives at once: a lookout, in a mask. Wayne "standing watch" is surveillance in its plainest form — a posted sentry — and the mask is disguise in its plainest form, and the two are fused into a single image at the book's chronological terminus. That the novel's furthest-forward glimpse of its own plot is a masked figure keeping watch over a grave-robbing tells you what register the whole surveillance-disguise theme finally resolves into: not tradecraft comedy but a solemn, mask-and-lookout ritual around a buried head. The first scene plants the theme's last image.