Hal supine, unable to engage Pemulis's urgent DMZ warning; appetite gone; alliance fracturing

texture · 20 Nov YDAU, later morning

• When: 20 Nov YDAU, blizzard morning (later, same V.R.5 session)
• What: Still horizontal, Hal registers a new anhedonic revelation — he "didn't have to eat if I was not hungry," and "hadn't been hungry in over a week." Pemulis (scarce all week, twitchy-eyed, avoiding Hal "as if he sensed something") comes urgently wanting to "interface" somewhere discreet about the "tu-savez-quoi" (the DMZ Pemulis scored for the WhataBurger, and its detectability — keyed to n321). Hal, dissociated and enervated, deflects every overture, refuses "temptation-rhetoric," and finds — for the first time ever — that Pemulis bores him ("I couldn't remember a time when Pemulis had bored me"), a marker of the fracturing alliance. He instead has Pemulis cue up Himself's Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms, fixating on the film-teacher (Paul Anthony Heaven) droning turgid theory while silently, steadily weeping — the affect/utterance split mirroring Hal.