the crime as the cure for numbness

The relapse high named without the drug: after a whole night of cocaine's frozen knees and dead nose, it is the predation — the snatch, the treasure-heavy bags pulling him down the alley — that restores the feeling the substance erased. The violence does what the drug stopped doing; he is at last whole from scalp to sole, and the wholeness is the tell of exactly how far down he is.