# Plain-Translation Audit — Chapter 21: Prying Loose / Faced to the Wall (Round 3 — current-text verification)

id: plain_translation | owner: claude | tier: risk | round: 3
chapter: output/chapters/chapter_21.md (drafter stage)
verdict: **REGISTER-HOLDS** — zero revision orders; every changed site generatively re-compared; both gates re-run at zero tolerance on the current text

## Scope and text state

Round 2 (REGISTER-HOLDS) was rendered against a text that has since changed at lines 39, 43–49, 51, 59, 75, 95, and 105–113, via the Characters-Wrong round-1 orders (five edits, verified executed by `chapter_21.characters_wrong.md`), the §8 followability tag tidy at line 45, and the Dialogue Doctor / Comedy Doctor round-3 verifications (both CLEAN/CLEAR, no edits of their own). Round 2's per-paragraph clearances for the deleted or rewritten passages — the perimeter thesis sentence, the mid-word hedge kill, June's reply, "*Okay,* he typed, and sent it," the fluent boundary manifesto — are moot; every changed site is re-audited generatively below against the named samples. Unchanged paragraphs were re-swept for seam contamination and re-run at both gates.

Calibration state:

- No inviolable passages declared for Ch21; no LOCKED entries.
- Samples used, by name (same set as rounds 1–2): **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** ("practical offer before emotional statement; qualifies when guilty, then forces himself plain"); **Odile dialogue spec** ("If praise would help, I would give it. It would not." / "Eat. Then decide to be tragic."; full forms when cutting precisely; one sentence, sometimes two); **reading-guide §2 plain-speech anchor** ("So if you quit, I lose the class." / "Yes."); **documentary text-message form** (Ch18/Ch20 thread register). June has no lines in this chapter; her dialogue spec was loaded and not needed.
- Enforced-by-absence sweep re-run mechanically on the current text, zero hits verified for all of: "load-bearing" (all forms), "keeping its own counsel," "findable," "only honest object," "thirty-nine," "tired before you got brave," "side of the ledger," "count first," "perimeter," "merciful," "species," "Sunday," "Okay," "deleted," "lender," "asking plainly," "recognized," "quotable," "syllable," "rhythm," mirror family. "small and square" hits exactly once (line 65, the designed keeper).

## Per-paragraph verdicts — changed sites in full

**D2-a (line 39, "You have worked under my name for eleven years...")**
HOLDS — conversation form — sample compared: Odile dialogue spec. The repair already performed the translation: round 2's shaped "I put public paper where hands would find it on purpose" is gone; the current "I put that page where you would find it. On purpose." is the plain, directly addressed version — there is nothing left to translate. "On purpose." is a card-licensed declarative fragment complete in intent; mass is two sentences plus fragment, at but not over her ceiling.

**D-new (lines 43–49, the speed-mispricing exchange)**
HOLDS — conversation form, checked only against its own form samples per the form rule (no plain-translation toward literary clarity). Against the Odile dialogue spec: "She sent the books back clean," and "No," ... "It is faster than nothing." are her full-form cutting-precisely register — the exact grammar of the named sample "If praise would help, I would give it. It would not." — at one sentence per turn. Against the Theo dialogue spec: "That isn't the same as forgiving us." is contracted, plain, and keeps himself inside the fault ("us"). §2 plain-speech floor and §8 followability, cold-read: Odile asserted the books came back undamaged and offered it as hope on a schedule; Theo refused the equation of clean returns with forgiveness; Odile conceded the word and kept the schedule. No decoding required. The tag on 45 is the ordered followability tidy that closes the characters_wrong garden path; any compression that removes it reopens the misparse. "It is faster than nothing" is adjudicated at the Aphorism Gate below (cleared).

**D3 (lines 51–57, seam: the cut tail on 51)**
HOLDS — sample compared: Theo dialogue spec + §2 plain-speech anchor. "He knew what he was about to ask for, and he asked for it anyway." is now clause-bare; the deleted tail ("because at least asking plainly was one honest act...") was justification, and its amputation leaves the binding-register version on the page — a rewrite has nothing to remove. "It was partly your fault." / "Partly mine." stands unchanged as the anchor-grade apportioning; the knife fold at 55 remains licensed hands instance one.

**D4 (lines 59–65, rebuilt boundary speech + initials)**
HOLDS — conversation form — sample compared: Theo dialogue spec ("practical offer before emotional statement; qualifies when guilty, then forces himself plain"). The speech now executes the card in order: inventory on-ramp ("The keys stay with me. The freight, the condition reports, the loan sheet."), the stall exactly where his card stalls ("I can do the job. I want it. I just-"), the physical restart off the object ("He looked at the box by the door, the split tape."), the forced-plain landing ("I'm done being the route. If you want a person moved somewhere, ask them yourself."). The generative test runs backward at this site: the fluent binding-clarity version IS the pre-repair manifesto ("you're going to ask them, out loud, with your own mouth") that Characters-Wrong Order 3 broke on purpose; smoothing the speech would be the drift. "I'm done being the route" is the sanctioned payoff of line 3's "none of the route was him." Closing narration: "one degree straighter than he'd left it" — only the man who numbers crates reads one degree; the plain rewrite ("slightly straighter") deletes the measuring instrument and with it the voice-card fidelity. Worse; original holds.

**P10 (line 75, "Fear of what, had been the assignment...") — the degraded misread; highest-risk site in the chapter**
HOLDS — sample compared: Theo voice card (inventory → risk calculation → delayed recognition of desire; never polished aphorisms). Binding-register rewrite attempted in full: "Fear of what, had been the assignment. For three weeks he had told himself she'd painted his helpfulness. Now the blank twelve-by-sixteen looked like the part she had left him, for when the jars and keys were done. He did not trust the reading. He wanted it to be true anyway. He had hung it above the flat files and walked under it forty times." The rewrite is measurably worse on all three axes. Dramatic content: "a clean square waiting until he finished the jars and keys and came to it" carries the schedule structure — finish the chores, then the blank is yours — which is the Characters-Wrong-ordered misassignment itself ("believes being indispensable is the same as being loved" restated as a reading of a painting); "came to it" puts him back on a route as the moved object, his own field restated; the flattened "for when the jars and keys were done" keeps the timing and loses the appointment. Fidelity: "a kinder reading than he trusted" makes kindness itself the grounds for distrust in four words; splitting it into "He did not trust the reading. He wanted it to be true anyway." sequences what the original holds simultaneous — wishfulness live, not narrated in stages — and the simultaneity is what keeps this misread from reading as insight. Density: nothing in the original is decor; every noun is inventory (jars, keys, flat files, forty times). Register check on "waiting": mild object agency, but it is his projection onto painted content — the wishfulness is the personifier, not the narrator. On "square" where line 73 says "rectangle": checked as a possible precision break and cleared as the transformation — the accurate ekphrasis measures "a small clean rectangle of nothing"; the wishful reading rounds the shape and drops "of nothing." The cataloguer misdescribing a dimension he just recorded is the degradation happening on the page; restoring "rectangle" would repair precision the misread is designed to lose.

**P19 (line 95, "The glassine lay open beside the easel...") — the offering temptation**
HOLDS — sample compared: Theo voice card. Binding-register rewrite attempted: "He could wrap the panel, put it in that box, carry it to Sonia's, and not have to speak first. He put the glassine down." Worse on all three axes. "Wrap the panel flat, slide it into that box" — the box is June's own return packaging, still by the freight door with its split tape; the temptation is his logistics reflex reaching for her route hardware to route himself to her, and the generic verbs delete that. "Not have to start with his own sentence" versus "not have to speak first": the original specifies that what is owed is authorship — the painting would speak in his place — which is the card's making-versus-managing hinge; "speak first" reduces it to turn order. The sentence-of-record ("He put the glassine down.") is already the plain close; nothing left to translate there.

**T1 (line 105, "*Can we talk? Sonia's. You pick the day and time and I'll be there.*")**
HOLDS — documentary text-message form, checked only against the Ch18/Ch20 thread register per the form rule. Fragment scheduling, control ceded in concrete terms (day, time, place), no rhetoric. Form-true; not plain-translated.

**P23 (line 107, "He read it over once...") — the sent hedge**
HOLDS — sample compared: Theo voice card (the bubble itself: documentary form). Binding-register rewrite attempted: "Then he typed *If you'd rather not, I understand.* and sent that too, before he could stop himself." Worse. "His thumbs started the next part on their own" places the eleven-year reflex below the level of decision — the Characters-Wrong-licensed reflex loss must be a loss, and "he typed" converts it into a choice, changing the ordered content. "The second bubble appeared under the first before he could take it back" prices the un-retractability on the screen object; "before he could stop himself" is self-report narration doing the same job worse. The hedge text itself ("If you'd rather not, I understand.") is his card's qualify-reflex verbatim and takes no translation. Noted: this is the second and terminal instance of the reflex family (with line 13); the body-agency ledger is addressed under standing conditions.

**P24 (line 109, "He put the phone along the sink edge...") — the wait**
HOLDS — sample compared: Theo voice card (risk calculation; lists). Binding-register rewrite attempted on the riskiest sentence: "He kept reaching for the plan: the study against the brick, what he'd say first, contingencies for each of her possible openings. Each time he stopped himself." Worse twice over. "His head kept reaching" is doing contrastive work the plain subject blurs: the preceding clause has just established that his hands have "nothing in reach worth moving," so an unmarked "he kept reaching" collides with it, while the head-subject relocates the managing reflex to the only free instrument — which is what makes "set it down like the drill" legible, a hand verb applied to a thought, closing the drill-alibi arc opened at 71/77. And "Each time he stopped himself" deletes the drill callback that converts the catch from willpower into practiced motion — the exact distinction Characters-Wrong required ("no narration countersigning a victory"). "The wait was terrible in an ordinary way" re-cleared as plain self-report whose meaning dies without the itemized contingencies after it.

**P25 (line 111, "The phone stayed dark...") — dark phone + shutdown**
HOLDS — sample compared: Theo voice card (shutdown-litany precedent). The litany is pure inventory: strip lights, humidity log initialed, thermostat, "the loan sheet on its nail with every column full for the first time in two weeks, *O.M.* beside his own writing" — ledger fact plus arc closure, no adjectives, no verdict. "He left it along the sink edge" was stress-tested as a possible echo/translation site and holds on function: the plain alternative "He left it there" misassigns the pronoun ("the last brush in the jar" intervenes — "it/there" attaches to the brush and the jar), and the object-subject alternative ("The phone stayed on the sink edge") would add a phone-agency instance above the positive-prose ceiling. The full locative is the disambiguator; the repetition from 109 is adjudicated at the Verbatim-Echo Gate (cleared, load-bearing). The look-back ("The study stood against the wall where he'd left it, stretcher bar out, pencil label legible from the doorway, painted side against the brick.") is uncaptioned object inventory; no clause tells the reader what the look means.

**P26 (line 113, final image)**
HOLDS — sample compared: Theo voice card. "walked home through the cold with his keys in his pocket and both hands empty" — unchanged wording, re-confirmed uncaptioned, and the Order 5 repair strengthened its plainness: with the phone left on the sink edge, "both hands empty" is now literal inventory (no box, no phone, no panel), not figure. A rewrite has nothing to remove.

## Standing high-risk paragraphs (unchanged) — re-confirmed

**P9 (line 73, ekphrasis)** HOLDS — Theo voice card + §8 smallness test; the inventory (keys fanned, the steadied table that "did not appear to need steadying," the filled nail hole at four square inches, the yellow-loaded white "lit from somewhere") cannot be plained without deleting information; "a small clean rectangle of nothing that the hands in the foreground were too busy to walk toward" remains painted content, not free wisdom.

**P14–P15 (lines 85–87, door and hair)** HOLDS — the round-2 comparison re-run stands: 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." dies without the door; "Bare ground, a cowardly inch of nothing" is painter's literal vocabulary.

**P12 (line 81, origin confession)** HOLDS — "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" — the round-1-ordered close-third rewrite, unchanged; still pinned to this man's history, still unquotable.

**P5 (line 11, loan sheet)** HOLDS — the accurate/accurate/accurately triple still shifts referent each instance (fact → her intent → his discipline); "he didn't have to check the date for that one" still carries 11/22 without figure.

Remaining paragraphs (P1–P4, P6–P8, P11, P13, P16–P18, P20–P22) are untouched by the round-3 repairs and were re-swept for seam contamination and gate candidates only: none borders a changed line except P21 (line 101), whose "the phone, which had been in his coat by the door for twelve hours saying nothing" remains the single cleared object-agency ceiling instance, unchanged.

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

New-text candidates tested, work shown:

- APHORISM-GATE candidate: "It is faster than nothing." (49) — the strongest new candidate in the chapter; maxim-length, epigraph cadence. CLEARED: quoted alone it does not parse — "It" has no referent without the clean-returned catalogs standing in for a forgiveness timeline; and an epigraph requires the text's endorsement, which the scene withholds — Theo's "That isn't the same as forgiving us." stands uncontradicted, the narration never ratifies her, and she exits the chapter still wrong. A shaped line the scene positions as error is character wrongness, not a pull-quote.
- "That isn't the same as forgiving us." (47) — "X isn't the same as Y" is a maxim template. CLEARED: "That" is deictic (the returned books) and "us" pins the sentence to the two people who did the harm; stripped of both it asserts nothing.
- "It was a kinder reading than he trusted, which did not stop him from wanting it to be true." (75) — the chapter's closest approach to an essayistic turn. CLEARED: both clauses are about "it" — this reading of this canvas; no general claim about kindness, trust, or wanting survives extraction, and the sentence reports wishfulness rather than issuing wisdom. Generative comparison at P10 above shows the plain split is worse.
- "he wanted to move something and had nothing in reach worth moving" (109) — near-portable fixer's lament. CLEARED: "in reach" pins it to the utility sink; it is a self-report of a want, not a claim about people.
- "not have to start with his own sentence" (95) — CLEARED: needs the box, the panel, and Sonia's to mean anything.

Standing candidates re-cleared with reasons: "Eight books did not fill a nine-book gap." (9 — arithmetic); "Fixing it would have meant standing in front of it." (69 — wire-bound); "It had been a maybe." (85 — door-bound); "He kept it because he had it." (91 — consent logic, unsmiling by design per Comedy Doctor constraint); "Eat before you decide anything else about yourself." (57 — Odile's license, matches her named sample, at ceiling); "You will be less convenient." (61 — pricing, not polish); "The wait was terrible in an ordinary way." (109); "I'm done being the route." (59 — paid-off setup, speakable); "with his keys in his pocket and both hands empty" (113 — chapter-bound inventory); "she looked back at him with no more preparation than she gave a wall" (21 — focalizer domain comparison).

Zero gate failures.

## Verbatim-Echo Gate — full re-sweep on current text

New pairs adjudicated, work shown:

- VERBATIM-ECHO candidate: "along the sink edge" (109 "He put the phone along the sink edge" / 111 "He left it along the sink edge") — the tightest verbatim pair the repairs created. CLEARED as load-bearing: the verb change (put → left) against the constant locative is the information — the phone does not move, he does; and the second full locative is grammatically required, since "the last brush in the jar" intervenes and a bare "left it there" would attach the pronoun to the brush. Non-substitutable.
- VERBATIM-ECHO candidate: "against the brick" (109, an item in his contingency list / 111, the verified fact at the door) — CLEARED as transformative: plan-image becomes witnessed object; the verbatim recurrence reports that the prop stayed a non-prop — he imagined deploying the study and instead only looked at it.
- "He left" construction family, now three (77 "He left the wire a half-inch low on the left." / 89 "He left it that way." / 111 "He left it along the sink edge"): not verbatim beyond subject+verb; objects and meanings are disjoint (respect for the canvas's verdict; honesty kept in the repaint; the wait left unwatched). Round 2 capped this family at two before the ordered scene-4 rebuild added the third; re-set at three and declared terminal — see standing conditions.
- "checking the headcap" ×2 (5) — CLEARED: purposeful inspection → purposeless continuation; "kept checking... anyway" requires the verbatim antecedent; the repetition is the event.
- "on its nail" ×3 (13, 65, 111) — CLEARED: ritual object tracked with state change each time (he hangs it; she hangs it one degree straighter; the litany finds every column full).
- "clean" chain (45 "sent the books back clean" → 75 "a clean square") — CLEARED: thematic rhyme, not verbatim construction — Odile misprices the clean return as a forgiveness schedule; Theo misprices the clean square as a kindness held for him; the same error shape crossing characters is the chapter's design, and neither sentence borrows the other's grammar.
- "sent/send" (23, 25, 45, 59, 107) — the route spine; the 23/25 speaker-trade ("You sent me for those." / "I sent you for nine catalogs.") is correction-as-content in Odile's spec register.
- "stopped" ×8 (9, 51, 57, 59, 81, 87, 95, 111) — density doubled since round 2's four; all pairs checked: no two share an object or a construction (self-interruption, dialogue verb phrase, doorway halt, painting halt, folding halt, threshold halt), and the plain finite verb is the binding register — elegant variation would be the drift, not the cure.
- "he'd left it" (65, 111) — common past-perfect comparative, different objects, 46 lines apart.
- "Odile said" ×6, including back-to-back at 43/45 — functional attribution; the 45 tag is the ordered §8 tidy; heaviness is the opposite of opacity.
- Standing pairs re-confirmed load-bearing, unchanged: "half open" (85/93 — remembered fact → kept fact); "bare ground" (87/93 — cowardice recharacterized as choice); "would have meant" (69/87 — at its cap of two, holds); accurate ×3 (11); "It was partly your fault." / "Partly mine." (53/57 — between speakers, reassigns the fault).

Zero gate failures.

## Cross-audit reconciliation

Round 2's standing conditions, re-adjudicated against the ordered repairs rather than mechanically carried:

1. "L69 stays the single thesis sentence" — the thesis sentence was deleted whole by Characters-Wrong Order 1. Cutting below a cleared ceiling violates no constraint (round 2's own rule); the chapter now contains zero thesis sentences, and the true reading of the canvas is reserved for June in Ch22, which also satisfies the condition's Ch22 clause (object memory only) a fortiori.
2. "Odile gains no new quotable mass" — she gained one shaped line ("It is faster than nothing," 49) by explicit Characters-Wrong order, as framed error the scene contests. A prior round's ceiling does not bar an ordered repair; the ceiling is re-declared on the current inventory (25, 29, 49, 57, 61 — concurring with Dialogue Doctor round 3): at capacity, no additions, no upgrades of flat lines.
3. "The shutdown litany takes no additions" — the litany was rebuilt wholesale by Order 5 (the text the condition guarded no longer exists) and is re-audited fresh above: pure inventory, passes.
4. "Leave-as-choice capped at two" — extended to three inside Ch21 by the ordered rebuild; each instance adjudicated distinct and load-bearing above. Re-capped at three, terminal.
5. "would have meant" at two — verified still exactly two (69, 87). Holds.
6. Hands-ledger reduction for Ch22 — unchanged and restated below; the body-agency family (thumbs 5, hands 55, thumbs 107, head 109) closed at its 107 inversion and 109 transposition.

Dialogue Doctor round 3 (CLEAN), Comedy Doctor round 3 (CLEAR), and Characters-Wrong round 2 (WRONG-ENOUGH) were all rendered against this same text state; no conflicts found. The stale `thought_development_round2` citation issue flagged by Characters-Wrong is noted and outside this audit's jurisdiction.

## Chapter verdict

**REGISTER-HOLDS** — zero revision orders.

Every repair-changed site was generatively re-compared against its named sample and holds: the speed-mispricing exchange is Odile's own form register carrying an ordered, contested error; the degraded misread's two engine phrases ("a clean square waiting until he finished the jars and keys and came to it," "a kinder reading than he trusted") are measurably worse in every plain rewrite because the schedule structure and the simultaneity of distrust-and-want are the misread; the offering-temptation beat loses its authorship stakes under translation; the sent hedge and dark-phone ending are already the plain versions, with the un-retractability priced on the screen object and the silence witnessed in inventory. Both gates re-ran at zero tolerance with zero failures; the strongest candidates ("It is faster than nothing," the sink-edge pair, the brick pair) are cleared on shown work, not waved through.

Standing conditions for any future touch (no orders; the text as-is is clean): the body-part-agency family (5, 55, 107, 109) is at absolute capacity — the head transposition at 109 is its terminal instance, and the Ch22 hands-reduction order stands; the "He left" construction takes no fourth instance in Ch21 and none in Ch22; "would have meant" stays at two; Odile's shaped-line inventory stays at the five listed; the misread at 75, the consent clause at 91, and the label paradox at 97 stay unsmiling and unquoted; the shutdown litany and the final image take no additions; June's Ch22 reply and the canvas's true reading re-enter this audit's jurisdiction there.
