Orin and the Swiss hand-model (pp. 565–566)

The sentence splices the childhood home into the airport without warning. Orin stands with his forehead against the glass of an airport gate — and the prose slips, "the glass of the Weston back door—or rather the Delta gate window," bleeding the present pane into a back door at 36 Belle Ave, Weston, the house of the primal scenes. The involuntary substitution does in one clause what the whole scene does at length: routes Orin's adult compulsion straight back to the maternal origin, the man at the glass unknowingly standing again at his mother's threshold. (It also rhymes, forehead-to-glass, with Tavis at the dawn window over the child he may have fathered — the family's men pressed against panes, looking out and seeing the past.) That the "steadying" hand arriving through the glass belongs to a Steeply operative Orin can't recognize only deepens the trap: the reach back toward the mother-wound answered by the surveillance closing in.