Orin’s Phoenix morning

Five days before, a bird had fallen dead out of an empty sky straight into Orin's Jacuzzi — "with a flat matter-of-fact plop," nothing overhead but sky, an "undistinguished" wren that seemed to have had a coronary in flight. Orin, who "inherited none of the Moms's phobias about disorder," just watches it bob and barrel-roll, "creating an illusion of continued flight," and only the next morning does it settle into his gut as an omen. The dead bird's fall hangs over the whole Phoenix sequence as portent, and its charge is atmospheric — the sense that something in the family's story is being foretold in the sky over the estranged son's private circle. (Carlisle reads this as Hamlet's fallen sparrow — "there's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow" — recorded, not adopted here; the raw supports the omen, not the allusion.)