the mother's head strapped face-to-face, inescapable — "he’s still staring at, into, and…"
he’s still staring at, into, and somehow through his mother’s face. As if the Moms’s head was some sort of overtight helmet Orin can’t wrestle his way out of.
Context
Orin's recurring nightmare literalizes the family's communicative condition as horror: the Moms's severed head lashed face-to-face onto his own with racquet-gut, so that whichever way he turns he is "staring at, into, and somehow through" her face, unable to disengage. It is the smothering-proximity of her love (the same face-flat-against-yours impression he does of her when awake) turned into a helmet he can't pull off — closeness so total it abolishes any outward view, contact as suffocation with no channel left open to anyone else.