The Enfield Marine units (p. 195)

quote

and the girl ended up back in New Bedford, and then within like three hours of hitting the streets got picked up by New Bedford’s Finest on an old default warrant and sent to Framingham Women’s for a 1-to-2 bit, and got found one morning in her bunk with a kitchen-rigged shiv protruding from her privates and another in her neck and a thoroughly eliminated personal map, and Gately’s individual counselor Gene M. brought Gately the news and invited him to see the methedrine addict’s demise as a clear case of There But For the Grace of God Goeth D. W. Gately.

Context

First time the map idiom is attached to an actual corpse rather than a threat or a joke — the euphemism suddenly has a body under it, which is exactly the weight it carries when the suicide chapters pick it up. Gene M.'s framing makes it a memento mori Gately keeps.

Quoted from

Scene 054: enfield marine units

In anthology

Depression and Anhedoniasupporting