the witness who witnesses to everyone but her — "She couldn't even say Go Away…"
She couldn't even say Go Away, though the smell involved in the man made it worse, the nausea.
Context
A perfect little machine of non-connection: a street bum loudly certifies himself as an eyewitness to a robbery, but he announces it to the passing crowd rather than to the woman he watched get robbed, and the crowd answers with its trained non-attention, breaking around him and reforming as if he weren't there. His witnessing reaches no one, the crowd's seeing reaches no one, and Kate — the one person he's actually addressing, palm out for change — can't even push the two words "Go Away" out of her concussed head. Everyone is transmitting; nothing arrives.