SHOT IN SOBRIETY

The hinge of the whole arc, and Gately's mind renders it as tabloid: not pain first but a headline, SHOT IN SOBRIETY, the phrase that fuses the two facts the book will spend hundreds of pages holding together — that he got clean, and that being clean did not spare him. The bold caps are the old grandiose-eulogy fantasy come true in the ugliest way, and the wound is the door into the hospital-bed ordeal ahead, where sobriety will mean refusing the narcotic that would ease exactly this.