freebasing through labor: compulsion at the floor
even when the pain of the contractions got to be too bad to bear she’d been unable to tear herself away from the ’base-pipe to go to the free clinic to deliver, and how she’d sat on the floor of the welfare-hotel room and freebased her way all through labor
Context
The theme's absolute floor of compulsion, past which there is nowhere lower to go. A woman freebasing through her own labor, delivering a stillborn child alone on a hotel-room rug while still loading the pipe, then smoking the screen, the steel wool, the filter to ash, and finally lint off the rug — the sequence is the Disease's logic taken to its terminus, where the drug outranks the child, the body, and every remaining instinct. The image of her passing out "still umbilically linked to the dead infant" is the theme's most unbearable literalization of the addict's isolation: the only tie left is to a corpse she poisoned.