methadone's chemical peace and the isolation-in-union of the queue — "the customers of #2 leave the…"
the customers of #2 leave the building deeply changed, their eyes not only back in their heads but peaceful, if a bit glazed, but anyway in general just way better put-together than when they arrived
Context
The methadone clinic rendered as a daily tableau of the disease's shape: fifty people queued for the same relief and each one somehow alone, choked-eyed at dawn, leaving peaceful and glazed. The chemistry works — it puts eyes back in heads — and the balletic isolation-in-union of the line is the recovery world's own portrait of what wanting-the-same-thing does to a crowd of the powerless.