a Michelin Man within her field of vision

They sit on folding wooden chairs that look as though they date from the Blitz, taking tentative sips of their scalding white coffee. But she sees that there is a Michelin Man within her field of vision, its white, bloated, maggot-like form perched on the edge of a dealer's counter, about thirty feet away. It is about two feet tall, and is probably meant to be illuminated from within. The Michelin Man was the first trademark to which she exhibited a phobic reaction. She had been six. "He took a duck in the face at two hundred and fifty knots," she recites, softly. Voytek blinks. "You say?" "I'm sorry," Cayce says. It is a mantra. A friend of her father's, an airline pilot, had told her, in her teens, of a colleague of his who had impacted a duck, on climbout from Sioux City. The windscreen shattered and the inside of the cockpit became a hurricane. The plane landed safely, and the pilot had survived, and returned to flying with shards of glass lodged permanently within his left eye. The story had fascinated Cayce, and eventually she had discovered that this phrase, repeated soon enough, would allay the onset of the panic she invariably felt upon seeing the worst of her triggers. "It's a verbal tick." "Tick?" "Hard to explain." She looks in another direction, discovering a stall selling what seems to be Victorian surgical instruments. 

William Gibson

Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. 2003. p.34