the socially-erased specimen on the T
On the crowded train itself, then, he discovered that he’d gone in three weeks from being a colorful and comely albeit freakishly comely person to being one of those loathsome urban specimens that respectable persons on T-trains slide and drift quietly away from without even seeming to notice they’re even there.
Context
The social terminus of the Bottom: three weeks of Withdrawal has converted Poor Tony from a person people looked at into a thing people unsee, "one of those loathsome urban specimens" the respectable edit out of perception. The addiction's endpoint is not just a wrecked body but civic non-existence — the addict at the Bottom becomes invisible by consensus. (The figurant-erasure mechanics as such — present, audible, socially annihilated — are communication-solipsism's, routed; landed here only as the social floor of the Bottom.)