# Plain-Translation Audit — Chapter 21: Prying Loose / Faced to the Wall (Round 2 — verification)

id: plain_translation | owner: claude | tier: risk | round: 2
chapter: output/chapters/chapter_21.md (drafter stage)
verdict: **REGISTER-HOLDS** — all 13 Round 1 orders executed exactly; full re-run produces zero new orders

## Repair-boundary integrity

The `0019...before_plain_translation_round1_repairs` → `0021...after_plain_translation_round1_repairs` diff touches exactly the thirteen ordered sites — lines 3, 5, 11, 33, 63, 67, the two-line P10 paragraph (old 69–70, removed whole), 75 (old 77), 83 (old 85), 87 (old 89), 89 (old 91), 111 (old 113), 113 (old 115) — and contains the thirteen ordered edits and nothing else. No unordered edit rode in; no substitute figure was coined at any seam. The current chapter is byte-identical to the `0021...after` snapshot (diff empty): no drift entered between repair and verification.

## Calibration state (re-confirmed on current text)

- No inviolable passages declared for Ch21; no LOCKED entries.
- Enforced-by-absence sweep on the current text, zero hits for all: "count first," "what else to be," "filed themselves," "did not claim," "opinions about needing," "if the painting were merciful," "He stood there with a drill," "a man who paints," "He kept it." (as freestanding clause), "finished thing," "unpainted cheek," "His hands went toward," "and that was all," "square and small," plus the standing bans "keeping its own counsel," "findable," "only honest object," "thirty-nine," "tired before you got brave," "side of the ledger," "load-bearing" (all forms). "small and square" hits exactly once — the L59 keeper instance, as designed.
- Odile quotability: at mass ceiling per tics. The only dialogue-adjacent edit this round was the L33 narration cut; her speech is untouched. Nothing was added. Ceiling holds.
- Samples used, by name (same set as Round 1): **Theo voice card** (interiority rhythm: "inventory of needs, risk calculation, delayed recognition of his own desire"; never-says: "polished aphorisms about care"); **Theo dialogue spec** ("I said boss because it was true. It just wasn't the whole truth."); **Odile dialogue spec** ("Eat. Then decide to be tragic." / "If praise would help, I would give it. It would not."); **June dialogue spec** ("That part works. Sorry."); **Reading-guide §2 plain-speech anchor** ("So if you quit, I lose the class." / "Yes."); **documentary text-message form** (Ch18/Ch20 thread register).

## Order-by-order verification (all 13, against the diff and the current text)

1. **EXECUTED** — "That was the order his hands did things in: count first, feel later." is cut whole. L3 now runs "He had the utility knife out of his pocket before he had his coat off. Eight catalogs, each one wrapped in tissue and interleaved..." — the count-then-feel sequence is performed by the paragraph's own order of events (knife, count, interleaving, then the June-wrapping memory), with no caption. Aphorism Gate hit #1 closed by removal.
2. **EXECUTED** — L5 now ends "...and his thumbs kept checking the headcap anyway because there was nothing else for them to do." Exact ordered wording. The thumbs no longer have an inner life; the displaced-grief beat and the carefulness-as-harm irony ("a book his own carefulness had carried into June's apartment") both survive.
3. **EXECUTED** — L11 now reads "he didn't have to check the date for that one." Exact ordered wording. The "for that one" isolation carries the seared date; the clerical metaphor is gone. The accurate/accurate/accurately triple after it is untouched (re-cleared at the echo gate below).
4. **EXECUTED** — L33 is now "'No,' she said, and drank her coffee." The narration-about-speech clause is deleted, not paraphrased. Her "No" and the coffee do the refusing. This was the chapter's one dialogue-diagnosis-family instance; the §2/§6 zero-tolerance rule is now clean chapter-wide (sweep below).
5. **EXECUTED** — L63 now reads "He ate the soup because it was there. Then he worked. There was a pallet of frame stock to break down and a humidity log to fill in..." The needing/needing philosopher clause is gone; the task list states he-works-anyway; the paragraph still lands on the wire and "Fixing it would have meant standing in front of it."
6. **EXECUTED** — L67 now reads "And in the upper right, where a window would have gone, she had put his twelve-by-sixteen." Exact ordered wording. The compositional fact stands; the canvas is allowed to be merciless without narration saying so.
7. **EXECUTED** — the P10 restatement paragraph ("He stood there with a drill in his pocket, having taken the painting down in order to service its hardware...") is cut whole, including its blank line. P9's ekphrasis (L67) now flows directly into the diagnosis paragraph (L69), and the recognition lands once. This also discharges the contingency on which Round 1 cleared the perimeter sentence.
8. **EXECUTED** — L75 now reads "because he had painted a woman he was pretending to date, from memory, without telling her, and he had known better than to call it a study out loud." Exact ordered close-third rewrite; the generic-man armature ("a man who X does not get to Y") is gone. Every indicting clause and the self-judgment survive. Aphorism Gate hit #2 closed by de-quotablization.
9. **EXECUTED** — L83 now ends "It made the picture harder to look at. He left it that way." Exact ordered wording. P18's "He kept it because he had it." (L85) now stands alone as the load-carrying instance. Verbatim-Echo #1 closed.
10. **EXECUTED** — L87 is now "When he stepped back it was finished. The door stayed half open. The cheek stayed bare ground." Exact ordered wording. Object-dignity elevation ("stood as a finished thing") and the unpainted/unpainted tautology are gone; the door/cheek parallel survives in plain register, and "bare ground" is the transformative callback to L81 — the same inch, cowardice recharacterized as choice.
11. **EXECUTED** — L89 is now "The glassine lay open beside the easel. He started to fold it back over the panel and stopped." Exact ordered wording. The re-hiding temptation is intact as his own started action; the third surplus hands-agency instance is gone.
12. **EXECUTED** — L111 is now "*Okay,* he typed, and sent it." The self-certifying "and that was all" is gone; the shutdown routine in the next paragraph proves the restraint instead of announcing it.
13. **EXECUTED** — L113 now reads "...*O.M.* beside his own writing." The inverted descriptor pair is gone; the reprise carries the initials, not the adjectives, and L59's "small and square" is now the sole instance. Verbatim-Echo #2 closed.

None satisfied by paraphrase or partial trim; every seam closes on an object or an action.

## Re-run: per-paragraph plain-translation check (current text)

Form ruling unchanged: close-third Theo narration (compare: Theo voice card), three dialogue exchanges (compare: Odile/Theo dialogue specs + §2 plain-speech floor), two text messages (documentary form; checked only against their own form sample, not plain-translated). All thirteen repair seams were stressed hardest, plus the five highest-risk paragraphs re-run in full.

**P1 (L3, "The box was inside the freight door...") — highest-risk #1, repaired seam.**
HOLDS — sample compared: Theo voice card (interiority rhythm). Binding-register rewrite attempted on the seam: "He had the utility knife out of his pocket before he had his coat off. Eight catalogs..." — there is nothing left to translate; the sentence sequence now IS the plain version the Round 1 rewrite specified. Strongest surviving candidate re-tested: "She had packed these to survive a route she had also arranged, and none of the route was him." Rewrite ("and none of it went through him") remains worse: blurs the referent and severs the setup for L53's "I'm done being the route." Route/route is plain-register noun repetition feeding a paid-off setup. HOLDS.

**P2 (L5, headcap) — repaired seam.**
HOLDS — sample compared: Theo voice card. "because there was nothing else for them to do" is flat causality; the further-plained "and his thumbs kept checking it anyway" loses the reason the checking continues (nothing left to be useful about — his card's exact wound). The ordered wording is the binding-register version.

**P5 (L11, loan sheet) — repaired seam.**
HOLDS — sample compared: Theo voice card (cataloguer's ledger). "he didn't have to check the date for that one" — the isolation clause carries 11/22 without figure. Re-tested "That was accurate. It was accurate on purpose, from her end, and he made himself write it accurately from his" at the echo gate: each instance still shifts referent (fact → her intent → his discipline); the flattened rewrite loses the third term, which is the paragraph's event. HOLDS.

**D1 (L15–33) — repaired seam at L33.**
HOLDS — conversation form, checked against Odile's own form sample only. "'No,' she said, and drank her coffee." — the narration is now pure stage action; nothing characterizes her speech. Chapter-wide dialogue-diagnosis sweep after this repair: the only narration touching speech anywhere is "He shut his mouth." (L35, his own action, not a characterization) and "he asked for it anyway" (L45, reports the act of asking, not the phrasing). Theo's spoken "That's not an answer." (L31) was tested against the §2 zero-tolerance rule: it refuses the content-status of her deflection, in dialogue, making deflection visible as deflection — it does not rate her language, rhythm, or delivery. Cleared. Odile's speech untouched this round; ceiling intact.

**D2 (L35–51, true-partial confession) — highest-risk #2a, untouched this round.**
HOLDS — re-confirmed against Odile dialogue spec + §2 plain-speech anchor. "It was partly your fault." / "Partly mine," she said — still the anchor-grade apportioning; "Eat before you decide anything else about yourself." still matches the named calibration sample move for move. L49's knife-folding remains the first of the two licensed hands-agency instances. Odile claims ignorance nowhere in D1–D3; "I put that page where you would find it. On purpose." remains admission, not innocence.

**D3 (L53–59, boundary + initials) — highest-risk #2b, untouched this round.**
HOLDS — Theo dialogue spec ("goes very plain" under pressure). "I'm done being the route" / "out loud, with your own mouth" / "You will be less convenient." / "Yes." — all re-checked; the L59 "small and square" is now the sole instance of the descriptor pair, and the L113 reprise reads as pure inventory. The echo order's purpose is achieved: the initials recur, the adjectives don't.

**P7 (L63) — repaired seam.**
HOLDS — "Then he worked." followed by the pallet and the humidity log is the binding-register version; the paragraph still lands on "Fixing it would have meant standing in front of it," which remains anchored to a specific wire and unquotable without the canvas.

**P9 (L67, fear canvas) — highest-risk #3, repaired seam.**
HOLDS — sample compared: Theo voice card + §8 smallness test. "where a window would have gone" is now compositional fact; the reader supplies the no-exit reading unaided, which is what the mercy clause was pre-empting. The ekphrasis inventory (keys fanned, steadied table, filled nail hole at four square inches, the yellow-loaded white "lit from somewhere") cannot be plained without deleting information. HOLDS.

**P11 (L69, diagnosis) — re-run with P10 gone.**
HOLDS — with the restatement paragraph cut, "She had painted a man maintaining the perimeter of a room so that he would never be required to stand in the middle of it" now lands exactly once: image (L67) → recognition (L69) → cost ("walked under it forty times"), no intermediate nudge. Round 1's contingent clearance is now unconditional: subject is the canvas (painted content, not free wisdom); §2 naming-is-the-event exception; matches the voice-card operation snapshot term for term. The de-quotablized rewrite still loses "required," which carries his whole alibi structure — measurably worse on fidelity. Cleared. Standing condition (shared with narrator_publicist_round2): this remains the chapter's single thesis sentence; Ch22 may return the canvas only as object memory.

**P13 (L75, glassine and origin) — highest-risk #4a, repaired seam.**
HOLDS — the rewrite is close-third confession: "because he had painted a woman he was pretending to date, from memory, without telling her, and he had known better than to call it a study out loud." Gate-retested below: no longer portable — "he had known better" pins it to this man's history and kills the epigraph cadence. Every indicting clause survives. The paragraph's remainder ("in a state he had refused at the time to name") still respects interiority discipline by noting the non-naming.

**P15 (L79, door angle) — highest-risk #4b, untouched this round.**
HOLDS — full generative comparison re-run: the plain version still loses "a generous welcoming angle that made the whole picture a frame around her" (what the flattery did compositionally) and "a door that could complete its swing in either direction" (the engine). "It had been a maybe." still dies without the door. HOLDS on all three axes.

**P17 (L83) — repaired seam.**
HOLDS — "He left it that way." — checked for a new collision: L71 "He left the wire a half-inch low on the left." Shared verb only, different objects, and the two leavings are transformative inverses (the wire left low is the old avoidance now made a visible choice; the narrowed door left harder-to-look-at is honesty kept) — not verbatim, not non-transformative. Cleared; the leave-as-choice family now sits at two, like the "would have meant" template — Ch22 should extend neither.

**P19 (L87) — repaired seam.**
HOLDS — "When he stepped back it was finished. The door stayed half open. The cheek stayed bare ground." Gate-tested the closing pair (see Aphorism Gate): the two "stayed" sentences are the designed mirror of the two fixes and are unquotable without their referents; "bare ground" is painter's literal vocabulary and a transformative callback to L81. The ordered wording is the binding-register version; nothing further to translate.

**P20 (L89) — repaired seam.**
HOLDS — "He started to fold it back over the panel and stopped." His own started action, refused; displacement follows immediately ("He cleaned his palette knife instead," L91). Hands-agency family confirmed at exactly the two licensed stress-tell instances chapter-wide: L49 (knife fold) and L101 (thumbs starting the qualify-text). The chapter is off the tic against the 16-hit hands ledger; the tics tracker's Ch22 reduction order stands.

**P21 (L91, label and faced-to-wall) — highest-risk #4c, untouched this round.**
HOLDS — re-confirmed: label quoted verbatim, placement as consent logic ("the labeled bar outward where anyone walking through the stockroom could read exactly what was there and no one could see it"), "He did not put it in a crate." as plain close. No thesis language re-entered at the neighboring seams.

**P25 (L101, the deletion) — highest-risk #5a, untouched this round.**
HOLDS — the mid-word kill ("*If you'd rather not, I completely under*" → "deleted them back to nothing") remains the qualify-reflex caught in the act; the second licensed hands instance retained by design.

**P30 (L111) — repaired seam.**
HOLDS — "*Okay,* he typed, and sent it." followed by the shutdown routine (L113) which proves the restraint the cut clause used to announce. §5 satisfied by structure.

**P31 (L113) — repaired seam.**
HOLDS — the shutdown litany reads as pure inventory: strip lights, humidity log, thermostat, full columns, "*O.M.* beside his own writing." Narrator_publicist_round2's standing condition ("the shutdown litany takes no additions") is satisfied a fortiori — the repair shortened it.

**P32 (L115, final image) — untouched.**
HOLDS — "walked home through the cold with his keys in his pocket and both hands empty" — still inventory, not verdict; still uncaptioned, per the publicist's standing condition; dies out of context.

Remaining paragraphs (P3, P4, P6, P8, P12, P14, P16, P18, P22–P24, P26–P29) are untouched by this round's repairs and were re-swept for seam contamination only: none borders a repaired line except P18 (L85), whose "He kept it because he had it." now stands alone as intended.

## Aphorism Gate (zero tolerance) — re-run on current text

Both Round 1 hits are closed:

1. "count first, feel later" — absent (order 1). The paragraph performs the sequence.
2. The generic-man study sentence — rewritten to close-third (order 8); "he had known better than to call it a study out loud" is not portable: it requires the pretending, the memory, and the hiding to mean anything.

New-text candidates tested and cleared:

- "The door stayed half open. The cheek stayed bare ground." (L87) — parallel-shaped, but both sentences are object states of a specific panel; quoted alone they are unintelligible. Not a maxim.
- "because there was nothing else for them to do" (L5) — flat causality, no claim beyond the thumbs.
- "he didn't have to check the date for that one." (L11) — ledger fact.

Standing candidates re-cleared, with reasons: "She had painted a man maintaining the perimeter of a room so that he would never be required to stand in the middle of it." (L69) — painted content, naming-is-the-event, now landing once with P10 gone; "Eat before you decide anything else about yourself." (L51) — Odile's license, matches her named sample, at ceiling; "Eight books did not fill a nine-book gap." (L9) — arithmetic; "Fixing it would have meant standing in front of it." (L63) — wire-bound; "It had been a maybe." (L79) — door-bound; "The wait was terrible in an ordinary way." (L103) — meaning depends on the renounced contingencies; "You will be less convenient." (L55) — pricing, not polish; "with his keys in his pocket and both hands empty" (L115) — chapter-bound image.

Enforced by absence, re-confirmed at zero hits: "only honest object," "thirty-nine years... design," "I got tired before you got brave," "Put it on my side of the ledger," "keeping its own counsel," "findable, dated, and named," "load-bearing" (all forms).

## Verbatim-Echo Gate — re-run on current text

Both Round 1 echoes are closed:

1. "He kept it." / "He kept it because he had it." — resolved by order 9; L83 now reads "He left it that way." and L85's clause stands alone. Verified: "He kept it." occurs zero times as a freestanding sentence.
2. "small and square" / "square and small" — resolved by order 13; the descriptor pair occurs once (L59), the L113 reprise carries only the initials.

Candidates considered and cleared:

- "half open" (L79 "The door had been half open" / L87 "The door stayed half open") — the repetition is the event: the repaint restores the remembered angle, and "stayed" reports that the restoration held through finishing. Load-bearing, transformative (remembered fact → kept fact).
- "bare ground" (L81 "Bare ground, a cowardly inch of nothing" / L87 "The cheek stayed bare ground") — same inch, recharacterized from cowardice to choice; the recharacterization is the transformation.
- "He left it that way." (L83) / "He left the wire a half-inch low" (L71) — shared verb across different objects, inverse meanings; not verbatim. Capped at two; Ch22 must not extend.
- "accurate / accurate / accurately" (L11) — referent shifts each instance; the third is the paragraph's event.
- "It was partly your fault." / "Partly mine." (L47–51) — between speakers, reassigns the fault; the plain-speech anchor working.
- "You sent me for those." / "I sent you for nine catalogs." (L23–25) — correction-as-content, Odile's spec register.
- "He read it over once." (L101) / "He read it four times." (L109) — the asymmetry is the information.
- "would have meant" (L63, L81) — transformed across objects, capped at two, none permitted in Ch22.
- "stopped" (L45, L53, L89, L105) — plain finite verb across four unlike actions; no two within echo range share an object or a construction.

## Cross-audit reconciliation

narrator_publicist_round2 (CRITICAL-DISTANCE-HELD) and positive_prose_round2 (INHABITED) were rendered against the pre-plain-translation text (snapshots 0018 and 0015 respectively). Four items they held as passes or EARNED were subsequently cut or altered by this round's repairs: "count first, feel later" (publicist EARNED), "stood as a finished thing" (publicist pass), "*O.M.* square and small" (publicist pass, "closest thing to a curtain-call"), "He kept it." (publicist EARNED evidence quote). An EARNED or pass is not a retention order — cutting below a cleared ceiling violates no constraint, and no replacement figure was coined at any of the four sites. The publicist's standing conditions all remain satisfied on the current text: L69 is still the chapter's only thesis sentence; the ending (L115) is still uncaptioned; the shutdown litany (L113) took no additions (it shrank); no volition-gloss entered the loan-sheet passage (L9–13 untouched by this round beyond the ordered "for that one" swap, which removes figure rather than adding gloss). positive_prose_round2's object-agency ceiling ("the phone... saying nothing," now L95) is unchanged, and its hands-beat watch item at the glassine paragraph is discharged: order 11 converted "His hands went toward the top fold" into "He started to fold it back," lowering the chapter below the state that audit noted.

## Chapter verdict

**REGISTER-HOLDS**

All thirteen Round 1 orders are executed exactly as specified, verified against the snapshot diff, with zero collateral edits and the current text byte-identical to the after-snapshot. The full re-run — per-paragraph generative comparison against the named samples, Aphorism Gate at zero tolerance, Verbatim-Echo Gate — produces no new findings. The drift families Round 1 targeted are structurally closed, not just patched: hands-agency is at its two licensed stress-tell instances, narration-about-speech is at zero, the recognition thesis lands once, and both echo pairs resolve to single load-carrying instances. Standing conditions for future touches (no orders; the text as-is is clean): L69 stays the single thesis sentence and returns in Ch22 only as object memory; the "would have meant" and leave-as-choice templates are each capped at two and do not extend into Ch22; the shutdown litany and the final image take no additions; Odile gains no new quotable mass; the hands-ledger reduction order for Ch22 stands.
