Hal's confession walk: hanging upside-down in the weight room

A stray image of the athletic body in extremis: Hal "hanging upside-down in the weight room with a forehead Lyle didn't even want to get near." Even the sweat-guru, who lives on the players' effort and will lick perspiration off a supplicant's arm, recoils from Hal's inverted, secretly-poisoned forehead. The weight room — the anthology's temple of the conditioned body — becomes the place where Hal hangs himself upside down in his private distress, and where the presiding spirit of the room, for once, won't come near. Something in the body has curdled past even Lyle's appetite for it.