Hal wakes to the blizzard, anhedonic
I was in a zoo. There were no animals or cages, but it was still a zoo. It was close to a nightmare and it woke me before 0500h.
Context
The novel's terminal movement (the GAUDEAMUS IGITUR dateline, first sustained first-person Hal) opens with a dream — three flat sentences that are pure anhedonia in dream form: a zoo evacuated of everything that makes it a zoo, still somehow a zoo, still close to a nightmare. Hal wakes from it into excess saliva, "a sort of nausea of the head," and tears stopped just millimeters behind his eyes; the dream is the condition's emblem.