Gately, the M.D.-temptation, the Demerol reverie (pp. 891–892)

Gately's Demerol reverie is a private Entertainment, and its structure is the cartridge's structure: a "womb-warm buzz," a self floated to the exact center of itself, everything outside gone abstract and distant, "the sun itself seems to be smiling." The high delivers what the Entertainment delivers — total self-enclosure, the mind cushioned in concentric circles of well-being while "pain of all sorts becomes a theory, a news-item in the distant colder climes." It's the womb-of-solipsism the wraith named, entered chemically instead of through a screen: the same escape from the unbearable self, the same warm sealed distance from everything that isn't the pleasure. The needle and the cartridge are two doors into the identical room, and Gately, who has watched both take people, knows the aesthetics of the buzz are the aesthetics of the lethal film.