freebasing through labor: compulsion at the floor — "the Eightball was consumed and then…"
the Eightball was consumed and then the screen and steel-wool ball in the pipe itself smoked and the cloth prep-filter smoked to ash and then of course likely-looking pieces of lint had been gleaned off the rug and also smoked, and the girl finally passed out, still umbilically linked to the dead infant
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.