Hal's Bartleby refusal to play; the self-crippling fantasy ("Never have to, never get to")

pivotal · 20 Nov YDAU

• When: 20 Nov YDAU, blizzard morning (room floor)
• What: The anhedonia peaks around tennis itself. Watching Himself's Accomplice! from the floor, Hal realizes he actively doesn't want to play the Fundraiser meet if it happens — "I would on the whole have preferred not to play" (a Bartleby echo), not even neutral. He then elaborates a detailed fantasy of deliberately taking a fall — off the HmH rear staircase or a club's observation transom — landing on the bad ankle to take out all its ligaments, so he'd "never play again. Never have to, never get to," becoming "the faultless victim of a freak accident... the object of compassionate sorrow rather than disappointed sorrow." He can't hold the thought long enough to parse whose disappointment he'd cripple himself to avoid.