collapsed into one bright point: empty of intent — "Willis, on the I/O night-shift, came…"
Willis, on the I/O night-shift, came up with a phrase for their eyes. “Empty of intent.” This appeared in a memo.
Context
The addiction's terminal solipsism, the self dissolved into its object. Hoyne's entire interior — "the iron will, the analytic savvy, his love of a fine cigar" — has "collapsed into one small bright point," the whole person shrunk to the single point of light on a screen, and the bureaucratic coinage for the victims' eyes, "Empty of intent," names the theme's endpoint exactly: an addict at the terminus has no intentions left, no will pointed at anything but the next hit. The phrase's arrival "in a memo" is the book's grim joke — office language reaching for the metaphysical horror it has produced — but the datum is pure addiction-recovery: the Disease's final achievement is a person emptied of everything except wanting. (The figurant/empty-eyes resonance is entertainment-self's / communication-solipsism's; landed here as the addiction end-state.)