Hal's face involuntarily "mirthful" while he feels wretched; the ghostly self-image

pivotal · 20 Nov YDAU, ~0500h

• When: 20 Nov YDAU, ~0500h (immediately following)
• What: As Hal reports Stice's emergency, janitor Kenkle insists Hal's face is contorted with "hilarity" / "mirth" — cachinnated, dimpled, gums exposed, "almost doubled over" — though Hal feels nothing of the kind (he keeps feeling at his own face, unable to read it; cf. event 63, and the earlier observation that hysterical grief is facially indistinguishable from mirth). The affect/interior split that frames the whole novel is now visible on Hal himself. Trying to check his expression in the snow-blazing window, "I looked sketchy and faint to myself, tentative and ghostly against all that blazing white" — a dissociation/ghosting self-image keyed straight to the Year-of-Glad opening.