Bain in Hal's imagining of the Moms's lovers

texture · 20 Nov YDAU; resolves nothing

• When: 20 Nov YDAU (Hal's insomniac rumination); the imagined encounters themselves undated and unattested
• What: Lying awake, Hal runs through imagined tableaux of Avril's sexual life, and the list of imaginable partners opens with the surname: "Bain, graduate students, grammatical colleagues, Japanese fight-choreographers, the hairy-shouldered Ken N. Johnson, the Islamic M.D. Himself had found so especially torturing—these encounters were imaginable but somehow generic." ATTRIBUTION: this is Hal's imagination, not an assertion of fact by anyone — the narration frames the whole passage as what Hal could and couldn't picture. The text gives only the surname (the archive reads it as Marlon, the family's Bain throughout — noted in Dating notes); nothing anywhere corroborates any Avril-Bain liaison. Recorded because it is the last Bain attestation in the novel's present and because it feeds the same liaison crux as events 16-17 — from the family's own imagining side. Resolves nothing.