the post-Stice debrief: the body at rest, squeezing the wrong hand's ball
the bad leg out along the couch in front of him, flexing the bad ankle idly, holding the other leg’s knee to his chest, squeezing a ball but with the hand he doesn’t play with
Context
Even collapsed on a couch, the body keeps conditioning itself. Hal sprawls in the Viewing Room "flexing the bad ankle idly... squeezing a ball but with the hand he doesn't play with" — rehab and hand-work running in the background while he broods, the athletic body unable to sit still even in defeat. The detail that it's "the hand he doesn't play with" is the tell: the maintenance reflex is so total it services the parts that don't even need it. Anyone else, the book notes, "would call Hal depressed"; the body just goes on drilling.