the crib under the breathing sky
The worst thing about Dilaudid for Gately was that the hydromorphone's transit across the blood-brain barrier created a terrible five-second mnemonic hallucination where he was a gargantuan toddler in an XXL Fisher-Price crib in a sandy field under a storm-cloudy sky that bulged and receded like a big gray lung.
Context
The drug-crossing rendered from the inside: five seconds of being an enormous baby throttling the bars of an oversized crib under a sky that breathes like a lung, the addict's hands clawing the air at nothing while Fackelmann stands back and watches him wait out the delusion for the nod. It is regression made literal — the substance returns the huge grown collector to infancy and helplessness — and the breathing sky recurs through the Fackelmann endgame as the image the drug always delivers him to.