Orin's Phoenix morning (iv)
The parishes around N.O. had been having a spate or outbreak of a certain Latin-origin breed of sinister tropical flying roaches […] that reportedly fed on the mucus in the babies’ eyes […] and it was during this spate or nightmarish outbreak, plus July flooding that sent over a dozen nightmarish dead bodies from a hilltop graveyard sliding all gray-blue down the incline Orin and two teammates had their townhouse on, in suburban Chalmette, […] that Orin had had his agent put out the trade feelers. And so to the glass canyons and merciless light of metro Phoenix, in a kind of desiccated circle, near the Tucson of his own father’s desiccated youth.
Context
The New Orleans trauma memory that structures the whole morning — the remembered horror is what drives the trade, the tumbler protocols, the scalding showers: Orin's present-tense routine is a machine built to manage one memory. And the flight from it lands him inside his father's remembered geography — escape from one past delivering him to an older one.