Hal and Pemulis on the DMZ and quitting (pp. 1065–1066)
‘Inc, what I know about your Da could be inscribed with a blunt crayon along the rim of a shot glass. I’m talking guys I know. Wolf Spiders. Allston guys, that quit. Some did a Clipperton, yes. Some ended up in the Mental Marriott. […] Most nothing big happened, that needed it and quit. They got up and went to work and came home and ate and went to sleep and got up, day after day. But dead. Like machines; you could almost see the keys in their backs. You looked into their maps and something was gone. The walking dead. They loved it so much they needed it and gave it up and now they were waiting to die. Something was all over, inside.’
Context
Pemulis's street taxonomy of what happens to guys who needed it and quit: suicide, the psych ward, religion — or, for most, nothing big: work, food, sleep, day after day, "But dead." Anhedonia described from the non-recovery side, in Allston vocabulary (maps = faces), and the book's grimmest forecast of what Hal's gray November interior is turning into.