Kate and Ruth trek up Prospect St. — "What’s remarkable to Kate Gompert is…"
What’s remarkable to Kate Gompert is that she seems to be able to move forward without any sort of conscious moving-forward-type volitions. She puts her left foot in front of her right foot and then her right foot in front of her left foot, and she’s moving forward, her whole self, when all she’s capable of concentrating on is one foot and then the other foot.
Context
The essay put immediately on legs: four sleepless nights into her secret Withdrawal, "psychotically depressed" in flat free indirect, Kate walks back from an NA meeting with the double bind resolved into pure mechanics — the body proceeding while the self can hold only one foot and then the other. The scene reprises it as the mugging closes in.