the withdrawal body in first person
I was still producing excess saliva, and my one pillow was moist in a way I didn’t want to turn on a light and investigate. I didn’t feel good at all. A sort of nausea of the head. The feeling seemed worst first thing in the morning.
Context
The cold quit narrated from inside Hal's own head as the novel hands him the first person: still oversalivating a week-plus in, a pillow he won't look at, a nausea located not in the stomach but in the head, worst on waking. The clinical flatness is the point — he reports the withdrawal the way one reports weather, the interior wreckage stated without any of the ironic distance that armors the rest of his narration.