Hal horizontal in V.R.5 (p. 896)
I was going to go back up to see about Stice’s defenestration, to check on Mario and change my socks and examine my expression in the mirror for unintentional hilarity, to listen to Orin’s phone-messages and then the protracted-death aria from Tosca once or twice. There is no music for free-floating misery like Tosca.
Context
Hal's to-do list minutes before the panic attack: "free-floating misery" is his own casual name for the baseline state — misery with no object, planned around like an errand — and checking one's own mirror for "unintentional hilarity" is the face-decoupling of scene 167 already normalized into hygiene.