Ceilings (viewer supine)

This is what the horizontal see: the novel's supine figures — praying, hungover, dying, or just staring — look up at ceilings that seem to live. The presiding image is "Herman the Ceiling That Breathed" (p. 447), whose "bulge and recede" rhymes across the book with a sky that bulges and with the E.T.A. "Lung," the ceiling "shiny as a lung" (pp. 809-810). Ceilings menace as much as they comfort: Gately eyes "his room's semiprivate ceiling like it would eat him" (p. 707), and prayer becomes "talking to the ceiling." The drop-tile ceilings also hide things — Pemulis's stash entrepôt, later raided — literalizing the ceiling as a lid over what's concealed. The system closes on itself in the final chapter, which "begins with the bulging breathing ceiling" and ends "the very air of the room bulged," so the last thing the reader is left staring at is the same breathing overhead the horizontal have watched all along.