Orin's Phoenix morning (p. 42)
For Orin Incandenza, #71, morning is the soul’s night. The day’s worst time, psychically. He cranks the condo’s AC way down at night and still most mornings wakes up soaked, fetally curled, entombed in that kind of psychic darkness where you’re dreading whatever you think of.
Context
October YDAU, Orin's Phoenix condo, 0730h. The thesis sentence of the book's first sustained adult portrait of morning dread: objectless, total, the day poisoned before it starts. "Fetally curled" and "entombed" seed the fetal/live-burial posture-chain that runs through Erdedy and the Unit #5 catatonics all the way to horizontal Hal and Gately.