the V.R.5 collapse: the meat in the room's sandwich
I lay in my tight little sarcophagus of space. The horizontality piled up all around me. I was the meat in the room’s sandwich.
Context
The body-as-meat vision closes on the horizontal. The room's every line — Kevlon fabric, viewer-top, shelves, cartridge-cases — "piled up all around" into pure horizontality, and Hal names his place in it: "the meat in the room's sandwich," lying in "my tight little sarcophagus of space." The athletic body that spent years as an upright instrument is now just filling, layered flat between surfaces, already half-composed as a corpse.