the Higher-Power impasse: not nothing but Nothing — "this like image in his mind’s…"
this like image in his mind’s eye of the brainwaves or whatever of his prayers going out and out, with nothing to stop them, going, going, radiating out into like space and outliving him and still going and never hitting Anything out there, much less Something with an ear.
Context
The theme's most honest treatment of the 3rd Step, the surrender-to-a-Higher-Power that Gately cannot make himself understand. He does the mechanical thing — knees at dawn for Help, knees at night for Thank You, "whether he believes he’s talking to Anything/-body or not" — and it works, the day comes out clean, but the comprehension never arrives. And when he reaches past the rote toward actual belief he meets not doubt but a positive void, "not nothing but Nothing," his prayers radiating unheard into empty space. The insight is that the program's method survives the absence of its metaphysics: the compliance is load-bearing even when the faith is hollow, and Gately's sobriety runs on a surrender he performs without believing in its object. (The prayers-dying-in-empty-space cosmology is communication-solipsism's; landed here as the recovery impasse.)