Joelle's walk and U.H.I.D.
The encaged and suicidal have a really hard time imagining anyone caring passionately about anything. And here too are E. Boylston’s dealers, sirens of the other, second cage […]
Context
Boylston Street, hours from the overdose: the narrator's free-indirect axiom fuses the theme's two master images — the cage of the self and the suicidal's flattened world, in which passionate caring has become literally unimaginable — and the very next clause welds the drug on: the dealers as sirens of "the other, second cage."