the loop that dulls the attention that might save him
The Excitement-Hope-Acquisition-Contempt cycle of seduction always left Orin stunned and wrung out and not at his quickest on the uptake.
Context
The closed loop has a cost beyond loneliness: it anesthetizes perception. Wrung out by the very cycle that seals him off, Orin drives away too dulled to assemble the clues — the wheelchairs timed to Steeply's absence, the two matched Swiss accents — that would tell him a net is closing. The sealed self doesn't just fail to connect; it blunts exactly the alertness that might have read the danger, so the solipsism becomes, quietly, self-endangering. [sweep · shared-ground surveillance-disguise]