Hal horizontal in V.R.5 (pp. 901–902)
I was on the floor. I felt the Nile-green carpet with the back of each hand. I was completely horizontal. I was comfortable lying perfectly still and staring at the ceiling. I was enjoying being one horizontal object in a room filled with horizontality. […] I lay in my tight little sarcophagus of space. The horizontality piled up all around me. I was the meat in the room’s sandwich. I felt awakened to a basic dimension I’d neglected during years of upright movement, of standing and running and stopping and jumping, of walking endlessly upright from one side of the court to the other. I had understood myself for years as basically vertical, an odd forked stalk of stuff and blood. I felt denser now; I felt more solidly composed, now that I was horizontal. I was impossible to knock down.
Context
The panic's last spasm converts into the revelation of horizontality — sarcophagus, meat, the room's every horizontal line piling up around him. The crest of the fetal/supine/horizontal motif: Carlisle makes the diptych explicit, Hal and Gately simultaneously flat, each a "hero of non-action" (p. 142) — depression-as-stasis transvalued, in Hal's closing logic, into invulnerability: what's already down can't be knocked down.