the locker room, continued: no words left for the fatigue
I'm not expanding the cage till driven by necessity of air. [...] So tired it's out of tired's word-range
Context
The communal-fatigue litany, the regimen's cost made convivial: one player won't even inflate his ribcage — "the cage" — until forced to by the need for air, and Pemulis declares the exhaustion "out of tired's word-range." The bodies are so depleted that breathing is rationed and language fails, the day's grind registering as a group sacrament of depletion where the only shared project left is finding words extreme enough for how the body feels.