IJ study archive

The Fackelmann scam and the wraith's return (p. 932)

quote

Facklemann’d made a fucking beeline for their luxury-stripped home and familiar safe-feeling hearth and had plopped down and immediately fired up the Sterno cooker and cooked up and tied off and shot up and nailed his chin to his chest and kept it there with staggering quantities of Dilaudid, trying to mentally blot out the reality of the fact that he was going to get demapped if he didn’t take some kind of decisive remedial action at once.

Context

What a dead man does with the time he has left: hide inside the Substance. The demap idiom again, but the blotting-out machinery — Substance deployed against unbearable reality — is the same engine the theme's clinical scenes run on. (The text's "Facklemann'd," against "Fackelmann" everywhere else in the scene, is preserved as written.)

In anthology