The White Flag meeting (pp. 366–367)
Gately looks at a rectangular blue-selvaged expanse of clean linen whose gentle rises barely allude to any features below […] and his own heart grips him like an infant rattling the bars of its playpen, and he feels a greasy wave of an old and almost unfamiliar panic, and for a second it seems inevitable that at some point in his life he’s going to get high again and be back in the cage all over again, because for a second the blank white veil levelled at him seems a screen on which might well be projected a casual and impressive black and yellow smily-face, grinning, and he feels all the muscles in his own face loosen and descend kneeward
Context
Joelle has just demolished 'Here But For the Grace of God' as senseless grammar, and Gately, with nothing in his huge head to reply, panics. The veil's featurelessness is what makes it terrible: a blank screen that takes whatever the Disease wants to project — specifically the smily-face of his Sergeant-at-Arms dream. Carlisle's extension (recorded): veil, samizdat envelope, and Disease all wear the same have-a-nice-day face — "and Joelle is in that film."