The White Flag AA meeting (p. 347)
it’s midnight now and all masks come off, and you all of a sudden see the Substance as it really is, for the first time you see the Disease as it really is […] this Substance you thought was your one true friend, that you gave up all for, gladly, that for so long gave you relief from the pain of the Losses your love of that relief caused, your mother and lover and god and compadre, has finally removed its smily-face mask to reveal centerless eyes and a ravening maw, and canines down to here, it’s the Face In The Floor, the grinning root-white face of your worst nightmares, and the face is your own face in the mirror, now, it’s you
Context
The Face In The Floor universalized. Hal's private childhood nightmare (019/064) turns out to be generic: inside the second-person litany of every addict's decline, the unmasked Substance IS "the Face In The Floor," capitalized like a proper noun, as if every addict in the hall has been having Hal's dream all along — and the last turn makes the face your own. The smily-face mask it removes here is the same one Gately's dream-figure wears ten pages later.