the toddler at the playpen bars
Gately reached in the dark for the bars of his playpen, grasped them with pudgy fists, hauled himself to his feet. His rising was more like the floor lowering. He wobbled like a toddler.
Context
Regression made literal at the binge's end: the huge man hauling himself up by the bars of an imagined playpen, pudgy-fisted, wobbling like the infant he keeps dreaming himself back into. The Substance has walked him all the way back down the developmental ladder to the crib below the breathing ceiling, helpless and pre-verbal — and it's from this posture, mid-toddle toward the buzzer, that the floor takes him down. The drug's terminus is infancy.