the sick fantasy of dying a hero
Late in Gately’s Substance and burglary careers, when he’d felt so low about himself, he’d had sick little fantasies of saving somebody from harm, some innocent party, and getting killed in the process and getting eulogized at great length in bold-faced Globe print.
Context
The active addict's self-loathing rendered as a specific daydream: near the bottom, Gately used to fantasize about dying to save an innocent and being eulogized at length in the paper — grandiosity and self-erasure fused, a wish to matter that could only imagine mattering by ceasing to exist. The scene sets this old fantasy directly against the real thing now happening to him (about to be shot shielding his residents), the disease's self-pitying dream and sober reality briefly, terribly, rhyming.