Orin and the Swiss hand-model (pp. 566–567)

Avril hangs unnamed over this hotel bed. Orin, mid-seduction of yet another Subject — a young mother with a toddler's souvenir football, no less — narrates what his compulsion is not about, and the negation names the wound precisely: "whose love you deep-down desire, by whom you feel betrayed." That's the mother, the one whose love he wanted and felt betrayed by, the absence his endless serial conquests are built to fill and can't. The scene makes the mechanism explicit a beat later — "because he needs her he fears her and so hates her a little, hates all of them" — hatred as the underside of an attachment that was never satisfied. Every Subject is a hand descending to pull him back from the same fall, and the fall is Avril-shaped. His whole erotic life is a repetition-compulsion keyed to the Black Hole of Human Attention he could never get to the center of.