the humidity of early sobriety: time in the House — "Gately remembers his first six months…"

The phenomenology of newly-detoxed time, which the theme keeps returning to: with the Substance gone, time stops being something you spend and becomes something you endure, "palpable" as humidity, audible as ticking "in clockless rooms." Gately's memory of "the sharp edge of every second" names the specific torment of early sobriety — not craving in the abstract but the unbearable granularity of an unanesthetized present. (Pairs directly with Poor Tony's time-as-predator in 069, the same phenomenon rendered from inside the Bottom rather than inside the House.)