# Positive Prose Audit — Chapter 12: The Memory He Chooses

Cold read against the reading guide register rules (§2), the Chapter 12 packet's prohibited moves, the voice cards, and the running tic tally. Mechanical gate shows 0 open findings, so everything below is in the gate-blind zone this audit exists for. The chapter's core material — the airshaft drawing and the deinstall — is genuinely inhabited; the LLM-clean residue is concentrated in the *framing* sentences around that material, where the narration keeps stepping back to caption, pre-explain, or epigrammatize what the scene already does. Several of those framing moves also re-open registers the tic tally retired.

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## 1. Which paragraphs feel portable to another novel?

`PORTABLE-PARAGRAPH — "The unwritten one had been circling him for two days, close enough to know it was his and still avoiding the door. Pain was not the problem." — Memory-as-stray-animal avoidance prose; this could open a chapter of any literary novel about a guarded middle-aged man (it would sit unnoticed in an Anne Tyler or a Fredrik Backman), and it personifies the memory as an agent, the exact "object acts like a person" move the packet zeroed out after Ch08. — ORDER: Replace the circling figure with what Theo literally did for two days instead of writing the card — e.g., the third card pulled out and put back blank, the pen uncapped and recapped — and let "nine years old and four floors up" (which is his and only his) do the locating.`

Counter-candidates checked and passed: the airshaft memory paragraphs ("Chicken thighs on the other side. Eighty-nine cents a pound. The drawing has a chicken-thigh ghost in it if you hold it to the light") and June's deinstall ("The formula was taped inside the supply closet door, that's how often that room got put back") are unportable — the Key Food circular, the doubled ballpoint mortar lines, and the supply-closet formula belong to these two people in this city and would have to be rebuilt from scratch anywhere else. The lamp image ("The lamp put a flat plate of light across the desk, and the two blank cards on it were the brightest things in the room") is the chapter's one sanctioned light image, rooted in actual room light on a surface, and passes.

## 2. Where does the prose summarize pressure rather than make the reader inhabit it?

`SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE — "Pain was not the problem. The memory was nine years old and four floors up and nobody in it was useful to anyone, and if he gave it to June she would have it." — "Nobody in it was useful to anyone" is Theo diagnosing his own usefulness wound with workshop clarity two pages before the scene dramatizes it ("Nobody asked me to do it... Nobody needed it"); the voice card says Theo is least articulate with himself, and this pre-statement makes the dialogue beat a repeat instead of a reveal. — ORDER: Cut "Pain was not the problem" and "nobody in it was useful to anyone"; keep the spatial coordinates and "if he gave it to June she would have it." The stakes should arrive for the first time when he says "Nobody asked me to do it" out loud.`

`SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE — "Three weeks ago the performance had been a schedule. He had been good at schedules." — Arc-summary epigram stating the feelings-are-real midpoint by negation, the precise move the packet bans ("Do not state 'feelings are real.' Let the transaction become harder to fake"); the concrete projection around it (Mara asking, having to say *fine*, standing next to June while she sets out greens) already does this work. — ORDER: Delete the two-sentence epigram; run straight from "as if it were nothing" to the look at PARTNER on Odile's card.`

`SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE — "The quotation marks felt necessary. He did not examine why." — A refusal-to-conclude variant by the book: the tally capped this family at Ch05 and the packet bans new variants outright ("decided not to have an opinion, or equivalents"); the narration points at the pressure and then ostentatiously declines to inhabit it. — ORDER: Cut both sentences. The block capitals with *you'd never know* in quotation marks, unannotated, is the inhabited version.`

`SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE — "because there was no honest way to paint that white without doing the work in the right order, and the right order was the whole memory" — Narration explaining the meaning of the gesture it is performing; "the right order was the whole memory" is a polished generalization, an epigraph dressed as a subordinate clause. — ORDER: Ground the justification in the literal process June gave him — cadmium ghosts through white, the twenty minutes of dead salmon can't be faked — or cut the clause and let GREEN FIRST. THE WHITE HAS TO COVER SOMETHING. stand on the card without a narrated thesis underneath it.`

## 3. Where does dialogue sound polished, therapeutic, aphoristic?

`POLISHED-DIALOGUE — "It never fully runs clear; you just decide a point at which it's clear." — The most quotable line in the chapter is the problem: the first clause is true slop-sink procedure, but the universalizing second clause ("you just decide...") is a minted life-aphorism about closure, delivered pre-resolved by a woman whose card says she compresses and deflects under pressure rather than concluding; it is fully transferable to any novel about letting go. — ORDER: Keep "It never fully runs clear." Replace the second clause with withheld procedure — she gave it a number of minutes, or she stopped because the next tenant was coming at noon — and let the resonance stay under the surface where June would actually leave it.`

`POLISHED-DIALOGUE — "Theo sat with that." — Narration, not dialogue, but the therapy idiom ("sit with it") leaking in as a beat-marker; it captions receptive listening instead of rendering it. — ORDER: Cut the sentence and go straight to the lamp image, or replace with a literal action that shows him not speaking (he already owns the quarter-turned water glass; a second physical hold would do it).`

Counter-candidates checked and passed: "Don't find out before tomorrow... It's better as the envelope" is compressed and slightly clever but says the true thing sideways, which is June's documented register, and it withholds rather than resolves. "And don't make me noble about it... No standing figure gazing upon the white wall" reads composed but is painting instruction inside her actual expertise — she is pre-empting a genre of picture, not narrating her wound. Theo's "I want you to have that one" is sanctioned plainness, named verbatim in the packet.

## 4. Where would literal precision beat figurative language?

`FIGURATIVE-WHERE-LITERAL — "drew two lines through CONEY ISLAND, AGE 12, as if he were voiding a check" — Fiscal-clerical figure from a register the tally retired (Ch07 legal/clerical at cap, Ch08 debt/ledger spent, both named as prohibited inheritances in the packet), and it then colonizes the chapter as vocabulary: "The second voided card," "He tore the voided cards." — ORDER: Cut the simile — the two lines through block capitals are already exact — and replace both later instances of "voided" with "crossed-out" or "dead."`

`FIGURATIVE-WHERE-LITERAL — "it was a closing argument. Each arrived fully formatted, immediate as a frame wanting a shim." — "Closing argument" is a Ch07 legal figure the packet explicitly bars from this chapter, and "fully formatted" treats his unspoken questions as document-objects (the sentence-as-object family the packet bans); the frame-and-shim clause beside them shows what the right figure for Theo looks like. — ORDER: Keep "immediate as a frame wanting a shim"; replace "closing argument" with a literal characterization (a question that already knew its answer, an accusation aimed at someone not in the room) and delete "fully formatted."`

`FIGURATIVE-WHERE-LITERAL — "the unlabeled panel behind them exactly where he had put it weeks ago, its problem still separate" — "Its problem" gives the hidden study an abstract possession, half-captioning the thread and brushing the secret-object personification family that stays at zero until the rupture; the literal check is stronger. — ORDER: Replace "its problem still separate" with the physical fact: still unlabeled, still painted side to the wall.`

Counter-candidates checked and passed: "the paint coming off it in a long curl, like a fern" is the nine-year-old's eye doing the comparing inside the memory and earns its place; "A memory with the pit taken out" is concrete, fresh, and diagnostic of exactly why Coney Island fails; "as if the card had been chosen to be insufficient" reads innocently forward and pointedly backward, which is what an Odile object is for.

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## Focused checks

**Theo-specific vs. generic intimacy-through-art:** The exchange itself is inhabited — Theo receives June's memory by asking *materials questions* ("What white, exactly?" "How many coats do I tell you it took?") instead of offering comfort, which is this man and no other protagonist. The drift toward smooth "art as intimacy" prose happens only in the connective tissue flagged above (the circling memory, the schedules epigram, the right-order clause), where narration steps up to a generic altitude the scenes never occupy.

**Memory concreteness:** Both memories resist generic romance decisively — chicken-thigh ghost, six or seven unevenly spaced clothespins drawn where they actually were, Decorator's White flat, the outlet plate with its two screws on the floor. No order needed here; protect these in revision.

**Empty intensifiers / transferable lines:** No empty intensifiers found ("absolutely" in "Mara would absolutely ask" is character-voiced). The transferable lines are the three already ordered: "you just decide a point at which it's clear," "the right order was the whole memory," "Pain was not the problem."

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## Chapter verdict

**LLM-CLEAN-FOUND**

Revision orders, consolidated:

1. Cut "as if he were voiding a check"; replace both later uses of "voided" with "crossed-out"/"dead."
2. Rewrite the "circling him for two days" paragraph as literal two-day behavior; cut "Pain was not the problem" and "nobody in it was useful to anyone," keeping "nine years old and four floors up" and "if he gave it to June she would have it."
3. Replace "closing argument" with a literal characterization; delete "fully formatted"; keep the frame/shim clause.
4. Cut "The quotation marks felt necessary. He did not examine why."
5. Trim June's slop-sink line to the literal observation; remove or fumble the universalizing "you just decide" clause.
6. Delete "Three weeks ago the performance had been a schedule. He had been good at schedules."
7. Replace "its problem still separate" with the physical fact (unlabeled, painted side to the wall).
8. Cut "Theo sat with that." in favor of action or a straight cut to the lamp image.
9. In the train paragraph, ground or cut "the right order was the whole memory"; the card line GREEN FIRST. THE WHITE HAS TO COVER SOMETHING. stays, uncaptioned.

All nine orders are line-local; none disturb the chapter's structure, the memory contents, or the packet's protected threads.
