a whole language shrunk to one denial — "Gately would haul his big head…"
Gately would haul his big head upright and try to allege the roundness of the planet, the three-dimensionality of the phenomenal world, the blackness of all black dogs—
Context
At the bottom of the binge, human speech collapses to a single reflexive phrase: whatever Gately says — a real question, or the roundness of the planet, or that black dogs are black — comes back only as "That's a goddamn lie." Conversation has stopped being an exchange and become a call-and-response with no content, one man tossing up any true thing just to harvest the automatic denial. Two people talking all day and nothing whatever passing between them but the sound of the words. [sweep · shared-ground addiction-recovery]