IJ study archive

Scene 012: orin phoenix morning

Scene
12
Pages
42–49
When
October, YDAU (2009), morning from 0730h (per the section header, p. 42)
Where
Orin's condominium complex, metro Phoenix AZ (pool, kitchen, bathroom)in: Phoenix-area Arizona
POV
Orin Incandenza (3rd person, tightly internal)

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Open questions this scene bears on

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 12)

Summary

Orin Incandenza, #71, punter for the Phoenix Cardinals, wakes alone at 0730 in October YDAU, fetally curled in his own sweat — "morning is the soul's night." The scene assembles his life from dread-soaked particulars: the perfumed note from last night's anonymous "Subject"; honey-toast eaten with the smaller right arm; sewer roaches asphyxiated under inverted tumblers; the recurring nightmare of the Moms's disembodied head strung to his face with racquet-gut (n.2: Orin has never seen a therapist, so his dream-readings stay surface-level); the New Orleans horror of eye-mucus-eating flying roaches and a flooded graveyard that drove his trade to Phoenix — "a kind of desiccated circle, near the Tucson of his own father's desiccated youth." A run of omens (the dead bird in the Jacuzzi, the Fenton schizophrenia documentary a Subject watched while he lay paralyzed) culminates in news of pressure to sit for a Moment-magazine personality profile, "the unexamined stress of which drives him to start calling Hallie again."

What to notice

Orin's unconscious works in his father's medium: the nightmare opens on "a wide-angle shot" and proceeds by edits — "the dream's screen tightens on him and abruptly dissolves" — a mind that dreams in camera directions; the Fenton documentary is likewise narrated as editing ("a terse old Public-TV cut", the brain superimposed "where InterLace's Time/Temp functions usually appear"), horror reaching Orin only through screen grammar. Notice the introductions: he is "#71" first and "Hal Incandenza's brother" second — a man identified by position and relation before he gets to be a person, which is roughly the scene's diagnosis of him. The imagery keeps producing false motion out of dead stillness: the drowned wren "creating an illusion of continued flight", the fanned sweat-outlines "like an acid trail or timed exposure" — repetition impersonating life, which is also what the interchangeable Subjects are for. And the prose performs Orin's fussy control in miniature: he stiff-armed the sleeping woman "though not in an ungentle or complaining way (the note, not the stiff-arm)" — a sentence policing its own grammar to the syllable, written for a man who cannot govern one dream.

Beats — page-by-page
  • pp. 42-43: 0730h waking: AC cranked, soaked sheets, fetal curl, "entombed"; the Subject's violet note with hearts over the i's; Ambush perfume.
  • p. 43: Honey-toast at the counter; cold floor, hot window; the asymmetric body — "his oversized left arm and big left leg remain at rest."
  • pp. 43-44: The pool tableau: beach ball, heat-shimmer "mirage thing where the extreme heat makes the dry deck look wet with fuel," malevolent desert plants; sweat-fossil outlines fanned across the bed "like a deck of cards."
  • p. 44: Five days ago: a wren drops dead out of an empty sky into the Jacuzzi beside his leg — "no way could it have been a good sign."
  • pp. 44-45: Trade history: Cardinals got Orin for a free safety, two guards and cash; the minty-yellow bathroom.
  • pp. 45-46: Roach protocols: tumbler-asphyxiation, separate Ziplocs; Himself's conscious horror of black widows; the New Orleans outbreak — flying roaches feeding on infants' eye-mucus, graveyard corpses sliding downhill to his mailbox — that made him demand the trade.
  • pp. 46-47: The dream: the Moms's cleanly amputated, stumpless head strapped face-to-face onto his with racquet string, unremovable however he thrashes [n.2: never any therapy; surface-level self-readings].
  • p. 47: The previous Subject (the ASU developmental-psych grad student) profiled: sharp jewelry, refrigerated chocolate (Töblerone), penchant for "professional athletes who thrashed in their sleep"; "Not real bright — she thought the figure he'd trace without thinking on her bare flank after sex was the numeral 8" — i.e. the infinity sign, ∞, traced unconsciously; his exit ritual (expensive toy mailed to her kid, phone number changed).
  • p. 47: Dream bleed-through: last night's Subject's note records that Orin clutched her head with both hands and tried to stiff-arm her in his sleep — the Moms-head dream acting on a real body.
  • pp. 47-48: The grad-student Subject and the InterLace redissemination "SCHIZOPHRENIA: MIND OR BODY?": Fenton, whose delusion is machines designed to pursue and entomb him, fed into the P.E.T. scanner exactly as feared, howling, while the voiceover stays brisk — Orin paralytically awake beside her.
  • pp. 48-49: The omen-ledger ("And then the matter of the dead bird, out of nowhere"); Cardinals-administration pressure re: the Moment profile; "drives him to start calling Hallie again, reopen that whole Pandora's box of worms."
  • p. 49: Coda: Orin shaves in the shower by feel, "upward, with south-to-north strokes, as he was taught."

Themes in this scene

  • Depression and Anhedonia: "morning is the soul's night"; days "not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically"; dread without object — Orin's A.M. condition is the book's first sustained adult portrait of the thing Kate Gompert will name.
  • Family and Hamlet: the Moms-head dream is the Avril-engulfment thesis in one image — the mother's face as inescapable helmet; Orin's serial anonymous Subjects are his repetition-compulsion answer to her.
  • Fathers and Sons: the trade lands him in the desert Himself fled as a boy; the closing shave "as he was taught" — the father's gestures persisting in the body (cf. scene 006's phone-locutions aphorism).
  • Annularity: "in a kind of desiccated circle" (p. 46) — flight from family geography that returns him to family geography; the fanned-out sweat fossils as repeated identical days; the ∞ traced on Subjects' flanks misread as "the numeral 8" (p. 47) — the infinite-loop figure embedded in his serial repetition-compulsion.
  • Dreams: the recurring nightmare of the Moms's cleanly amputated head strung face-to-face onto his own with racquet gut (pp. 46-47), dreamt in his father's medium of camera directions and never interpreted (n.2: no therapy, surface readings only); it bleeds into waking fact via the Subject's note reporting that he clutched her head and stiff-armed her in his sleep (p. 47).
  • Memory and Forgetting: the morning is run by involuntary recall — the New Orleans horror (the eye-mucus roaches, the graveyard corpses sliding downhill to his mailbox) resurfaces in full sensory detail as the standing explanation for the trade west (pp. 45-46): trauma memory as the architecture of a present it will not release.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • Phoenix postmark: scene 007's "HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!" mailer comes from suburban Phoenix — this scene establishes Orin's residence there six months after the attaché mailing (and the chronology wrinkle: the scene's October header vs. the 9 May call of scene 006, which "start calling Hallie again" seems to predate; the timeline is loose or the pressure long-running).
  • Fenton's P.E.T. entombment — worst fears mechanically realized — is a miniature of the book's punishment logic (cf. Lenz, Fackelmann, the attaché) and echoes "entombed" from Erdedy's ending (p. 27, scene 004).
  • The Moms-head dream pairs with the book's other parental-head horror: Hal's YG vision of digging up his father's head with Gately (p. 17, scene 003) — each surviving parent reduced to a detached head (pairing per Carlisle).
  • Ambient-detail stitching to the attaché thread (Carlisle, plausible): the morning aerobics show heard through closed windows is probably a Tawni Kondo "Fit Forever" InterLace session (cf. p. 35, scene 007), and the grad-student Subject's freezer Töblerone echoes the attaché's Prince Q———'s favorite (p. 34) — Phoenix is also where the attaché's fatal mailer was postmarked (scene 007).

Forward

  • The Moment profile is Hugh Steeply's "Helen Steeply" cover: the U.S.O.U.S. approach to Orin as suspected samizdat-source runs from here through the Orin-Helen interviews to Orin's capture under the tumbler-giant glass (p. 971, scene 184) — note the poetic justice of the roach-tumblers introduced here.
  • Marlon Bain and Bain's sister: Bain is Orin's old doubles partner whose Steeply correspondence (n.269) supplies the counter-dossier on Avril and JOI.
  • Orin's Subjects-and-spooning material develops in the later Orin sections (scenes 113/115/119: pp. 565-567, 574-575, 596-601); his terror of heights and early mornings pays off in the punting-career origin story (pp. 283-299).
  • Idiom seed: roaches give Orin "the howling fantods" (p. 45) — Avril's family phrase, recurring in the very next scene as her "howling case of the maternal fantods" (p. 50, scene 013).
  • Carlisle-flagged (recorded, not adopted as text-fact): the dead "wren, maybe" as an O-rin name-pun and a Hamlet "special providence in the fall of a sparrow" echo (V.ii); the bird-omen pays off visually when Orin himself descends as a falling fake bird at Mile High (scene 021).
  • Walt Flechette (p. 46, dream-cast) shares a surname with first-generation E.T.A. Dwight Flechette (pp. 948 and 955, both scene 179) — relation unstated; as printed.

Notable passages (7)
  • p. 42: "For Orin Incandenza, #71, morning is the soul's night." — thesis sentence.
  • p. 43 (within pp. 43-44 block): the sweat-fossil "deck of cards" image — repetition-as-identity.
  • pp. 46-47: the Moms-head dream paragraph — the single most-cited family-hamlet image in the Orin material.
  • p. 46: "in a kind of desiccated circle, near the Tucson of his own father's desiccated youth" — annularity stated in geography.
  • p. 45: "These Southwest sewer roaches you turn on the light and they just look up at you from the tile like: 'You got a problem?'" — comic register inside the dread.
  • p. 47: "she thought the figure he'd trace without thinking on her bare flank after sex was the numeral 8" — the unconscious infinity sign in the Orin material.
  • p. 46: "the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer." — the dread phenomenology; pairs with Kate Gompert's It (scene 024) in any depression anthology.

What links here Timeline events here (6) · Connected from (24) · Passages quoted here (42) · Motifs (7)

Timeline events here

Connected from

Passages quoted here

Motifs