the grief-therapy call: talking about it's broken the spell

The scene's named turn (p. 248): the moment Hal narrates the Zone, he loses it. "Talking about it's broken the spell. Now I'm self-conscious and afraid" — the self-consciousness that kills flow, made literal by a boy who can no longer clip a toenail because he's watching himself do it. He's "frozen with aboriginal terror," "poised, studying the foot," the calibrated unconsciousness gone the instant it became an object of attention. It's the whole athletic-psyche problem in miniature: the state exists only where the self isn't looking.