Hal horizontal in V.R.5 (pp. 896–897)
But the panic was there too, endocrinal, paralyzing, and with an overcognitive, bad-trip-like element that I didn’t recognize from the very visceral on-court attacks of fear. Something like a shadow flanked the vividness and lucidity of the world. […] The familiarity of Academy routine took on a crushing cumulative aspect. The total number of times I’d schlepped up the rough cement steps of the stairwell, seen my faint red reflection in the paint of the fire door, walked the 56 steps down the hall to our room, opened the door and eased it gently back flush in the jamb to keep from waking Mario. I reexperienced the years’ total number of steps, movements, the breaths and pulses involved. […] Maybe the worst part of the cognitions involved the incredible volume of food I was going to have to consume over the rest of my life. Meal after meal, plus snacks. Day after day after day. Experiencing this food in toto. Just the thought of the meat alone. One megagram? Two megagrams? I experienced, vividly, the image of a broad cool well-lit room piled floor to ceiling with nothing but the lightly breaded chicken fillets I was going to consume over the next sixty years. The number of fowl vivisected for a lifetime’s meat. […] And another, dimmer room, filled with the rising mass of the excrement I’d produce, the room’s double-locked steel door gradually bowing outward with the mounting pressure….
Context
The off-court panic attack in the damp hallway, walking back from the Stice rescue: the world goes unbearably vivid with "something like a shadow" flanking it, and then the content arrives — life experienced in toto, as sheer crushing repetition, every stair, breath, and breaded chicken fillet of the remaining sixty years stacked in one room. Depression's time-sense rendered with total arithmetic literalism; this is what knocks Hal flat onto the Viewing Room floor for the rest of the book.