the Fackelmann Dilaudid binge

Passive spectation reaches its physical limit here. Gately is so far gone that he watches the flames-cartridge not on the wall but in the spreading puddle of his and Fackelmann's mixed urine on the floor, because the reflection lets him "watch without taking his chin off his chest" — the viewer so entirely surrendered to horizontality and stupor that he arranges to receive the image without the labor of lifting his head. It's the reclined pleasure-death posture pushed past the recliner to the floor, past even the effort of looking up, the body reduced to a chin on a chest and two eyes pointed downward at a reflection in filth. The theme's whole trajectory — from the attaché in his recliner to the metropolis fouling its divans — arrives at this: a man watching fire in his own piss because raising his eyes is more than the pleasure is worth.