the DTs and the trade of shoes for Librium
They took away his Florsheims after 24 abstinent hours had passed and he started to perhaps D.T. a little. He’d kept noticing mice scurrying around his room, mice as in rodents, vermin
Context
Detox rendered as low farce with real terror underneath: twenty-four abstinent hours and the hallucinated mice arrive, Ewell hunting them with the heel of a shoe until the ward trades his Florsheims for Librium. The nurse's line — the sedative will "fumigate what really needed to be fumigated" — locates the vermin correctly, inside the withdrawing man, not the walls.