The Fackelmann scam and the wraith's return (pp. 922–923)
The room’s windowlight is darkening to that Kaopectate shade that has always marked the just-pre-sunset time of day that Gately (like most drug addicts) has always most dreaded, and had always either lowered his helmet and charged extra-murderous at somebody to block it out (the late-day dread) or else dropped QuoVadis or oral narcotics or turned on Mr. Bouncety-Bounce extra loud or busied himself in his silly chef’s hat in the Ennet House kitchen or made sure he was at a Meeting sitting way up close in nose-pore range, to block it out (the late-day dread), the gray-light late-afternoon dread, always worse in winter, the dread, in winter’s watered-down light—just like the secret dread he’s always felt whenever everybody happened to ever leave the room and left him alone in a room, a terrible stomach-sinking dread that probably dates all the way back to being alone in his XXL Dentons and crib below Herman the Ceiling That Breathed.
Context
Gately, tube-mouthed and feverish in St. E.'s Trauma Ward, watches the gray November afternoon fail and finally names the thing he's spent a whole life outrunning: an objectless, lifelong, worse-in-winter dread that violence, Substances, the kitchen, and front-row Meetings all existed to block out. It's the Gately half of the book's closest approach to Kate's It — and the parenthetical "(like most drug addicts)" quietly makes it a clinical claim about the whole population. Now, sober and immobilized, he has to face the hour bare.