Orin’s Phoenix morning (pp. 44–47)

The waking counterpart to the dream. Orin's endless procession of "Subjects" is quietly specified as a procession of mothers — this one a divorced grad student "with two kids," the pattern the book later names outright as his compulsive seduction of young married mothers. The scene juxtaposes them without comment: the head he can't get off his face at night, and the interchangeable maternal women he beds and then disposes of by morning (mailing the child "an expensive present," changing his phone number). The serial conquest reads as the repetition-compulsion answer to the helmet dream — a man trying to master, one disposable mother at a time, the maternal face he cannot escape in sleep. He does to these mothers what he cannot do to the Moms: leave them first, cleanly, on his own terms. The estrangement and the promiscuity are the same wound worked from opposite ends.