the Removal: out of the cage since he was ten

The central miracle of the whole theme, and the payoff of the hypocrite's mechanical practice. After five months of faithless knee-prayers, Gately notices on the 0430 train that the craving is simply gone — not resisted, not white-knuckled, but "Removed," the days going by without Substances even occurring to him. The freedom is dated precisely to a cage he's been in "since he was maybe ten," tying the Removal back to the childhood couch and his mother's Stolichnaya. And the theme's characteristic honesty holds: Gately's response is not gratitude but suspicion, because a Higher Power he never believed in has let him out of a cage he had "zero hope of ever being let out of," and the inexplicability of the thing that is working drives him to crack a tabletop with his head. Recovery arrives as an unearned, unintelligible reprieve.