Hal's grief-therapy ordeal and the "something smelled delicious" breakthrough

pivotal · YTSDB (2004), Apr-May

• When: April-May YTSDB (2004), ~six weeks, four days/week, after JOI's death
• What: Within hours of the death, Rusk and Avril shunted Hal into intensive grief-therapy with a "top grief-man." Hal — who insists "I really didn't feel anything" — could not deliver the emotion the therapist wanted; he mined the grief literature, faked the Kübler-Ross stages, and failed, while his tennis and sleep collapsed and "the nightmares started. I kept dreaming of a face in the floor" (see event 15). Lyle's key insight — study the grief-PROFESSIONAL's literature and empathize with the therapist — let Hal engineer a cathartic performance: feigned rage giving way to the buried confession that his true first reaction on entering the house that day was hunger — "That something smelled delicious!" He "absolved" himself to the therapist's ecstasy, then collapsed in hysterical laughter in a men's room upon seeing the therapist's tiny "four-year-old girl's" hands. A defining study in Hal's inability to feel and his genius for performing what authorities want. (The therapist is recalled in the YG frame as "the hypophalangial Grief-Therapist.")