everything seemed like a movie when I got real drunk — "We all walked him around in…"

Gately's using-days bottom, told flat to Joelle at the graveyard shift: a man was shot in front of him and the whole crew was too drunk to register it as real, because deep intoxication turned catastrophe into cinema. And the folk-remedy reflex — walk the dying man in circles like an overdose case, keep him moving till the ambulance comes — is the drunk's competence standing in for the sober one he no longer has. The derealization is the point: the substance did not numb the horror, it converted it into something happening to someone else, onscreen.