Blind Faith in senseless language: the cage panics back — "he has absolutely nothing in his…"
he has absolutely nothing in his huge square head to Identify with her with or latch onto or say in encouraging reply, and for an instant the Provident cafeteria seems pin-drop silent, and his own heart grips him like an infant rattling the bars of its playpen, and he feels a greasy wave of an old and almost unfamiliar panic, and for a second it seems inevitable that at some point in his life he’s going to get high again and be back in the cage all over again, because for a second the blank white veil levelled at him seems a screen on which might well be projected a casual and impressive black and yellow smily-face
Context
The scene's terminal crisis, where the program's demand collides with a lexical mind that cannot make itself submit. Joelle's despair is precisely the addict's: Substances have brought her to a "pass" where survival requires Blind Faith in language she can prove is meaningless — the surrender of intellect is the price of staying alive, and she can see the price. And her critique lands on Gately as relapse-vertigo, not as argument: with "nothing in his huge square head" to answer her, the Disease reasserts instantly — the cage, the old panic, the smily-face flickering onto her blank veil. The theme's darkest note is here: the same intelligence that sees through the clichés is the intelligence that will not let you be saved by them, and it summons the Spider back the moment it's given the floor. (Closes on Gately deciding to Turn It Over and settling in "asking silently for help to be determined to try to really hear or die trying." The subjunctive/counterfactual grammar critique itself is language-grammar's/irony-sincerity's — cross-ref.)