sober but without any money and still clueless
It hadn’t been this way at the start, the soul-sucking aspect, and Gately every couple minutes wonders again what he’ll end up doing when his year’s Staff term is up and his soul is sucked out and he’s sober but without any money and still clueless and has to leave here and do something back Out There.
Context
The cost of sober service stated without heroics: the double shifts empty Gately out, and past the picayune grind sits the real dread — that at the end of his Staff year he'll be exactly what he is now, sober and broke and clueless, with nowhere to go but back Out There. The book refuses to make recovery a triumph here; it is a soul-sucking job that keeps a man dry without yet giving him a life, the white-knuckle present tense with no visible after. This is Gately's whole precarity in one sentence.