Erdedy and Kate at the NA marijuana meeting
Ken Erdedy noticed that nobody came right out and used the terms melancholy or anhedonia or depression, much less clinical depression; but this worst of symptoms, this logarithm of all suffering, seemed, though unmentioned, to hang fog-like just over the room’s heads, to drift between the peristyle columns and over the decorative astrolabes and candles on long prickets and medieval knockoffs and framed Knights of Columbus charters, a gassy plasm so dreaded no beginner could bear to look up and name it. Kate Gompert kept staring at the floor and making a revolver of her forefinger and thumb and shooting herself in the temple and then blowing pretend-cordite off the barrel’s tip until Johnette Foltz whispered to her to knock it off.
Context
Metro Boston's one grass-devoted NA meeting: two dozen beginners catalog every symptom in the book except the one that matters — depression as "this worst of symptoms, this logarithm of all suffering," literally unspeakable, a fog over the circle. And under it, silently, Kate mimes the revolver, keeping her suicide thread alive in pantomime while the room can't even say the word.