The recovered JOI-Orin memory; Hal's grief at never having had intimacy with Himself

pivotal · 20 Nov YDAU

• When: 20 Nov YDAU (present recall of an old event)
• What: A memory Hal had felt hanging "just out of conscious reach" (its inaccessibility itself threatening another panic-attack) finally returns: Himself, called to discipline teenage Orin over a planned porn-viewing, instead spoke with rare, reticent fatherly openness — declining to forbid it but wishing Orin would wait to have sex with someone he loved before seeing sex portrayed as "organs going in and out of other organs, emotionless, terribly lonely." What moves Hal is his own exclusion: "It was the most open I'd ever heard of Himself being with anybody... I'd never once had a conversation nearly that open or intimate with Himself." His single most intimate memory of his father is purely sensory — being carried up to bed, the scratch of jaw and smell of neck. The fathers-sons wound at the arc's center: love that never reached Hal in words.