the vestige: racing the train — "He doesn’t have a license, it’s…"
He doesn’t have a license, it’s not his car, it’s a priceless art-object car, it’s his boss’s car, who he owes his life to and sort of maybe loves, he’s on a vegetable-run for shattered husks of newcomers just out of detox whose eyes are rolling around in their heads.
Context
The unrecovered residue inside the recovered man. Gately racing a Green Line train at 75 kph, cutting it as close as he can at the split, is diagnosed by his own program-trained mind as "a dark vestige of his old low-self-esteem suicidal-thrill behaviors" — the death-wish that fed the addiction not gone but idling, expressing itself now in traffic instead of in a needle. The pile-up of reasons it's insane (no license, borrowed priceless car, the woman he owes his life to, the sick newcomers depending on the errand) is the sober conscience narrating in real time, unable to stop the behavior it can perfectly analyze. The theme's realism: sobriety removes the Substance, not the wiring that wanted it.