How dare you

The climax of the relapse arc reveals what the killing has always been for: "How dare you," spoken over the dying animal, exposes the affect underneath — not sadism exactly but a rage at being wronged, the impotent Powerlessness of a man cornered by two legal systems and a squalid House finally inverted into one moment of total authority. He stands over the dog at full height like a parent over a punished child, and the posture is the whole point: the addict who can resolve nothing in his own life resolving it, nightly, on something that cannot fight back. The book has been calling this a recovery datum since it began, the untreated first-months rage finding the only outlet a mind with no interior tools can build.