the body keeps the schedule: the spit-flood
Hal usually gets secretly high so regularly these days this year that if by dinnertime he hasn’t gotten high yet that day his mouth begins to fill with spit—some rebound effect from B. Hope’s desiccating action—and his eyes start to water as if he’s just yawned. The smokeless tobacco started almost as an excuse to spit, sometimes.
Context
Dependence rendered as autonomic clockwork: the habit is now regular enough that missing the daily high floods his mouth with rebound saliva and waters his eyes, a physiological alarm the body sounds on schedule. The Kodiak began partly as cover for the spitting — one concealment nested inside another — which is how far the machinery has already built itself out around the secret.