Kate and Ruth trek up Prospect (p. 699)
Foot-traffic is dense, and the undead and drunks who live in the streets around Inman Square also crowd the sidewalk’s edges, and if Kate G. looks at the images of passersby in the darkened shop windows they become (pedestrians and undead stem-artists) just heads that seem to float across each window unconnected to anything. As in disconnected floating heads.
Context
Saturday night, 14 November: Kate Gompert, four nights sleepless and deep in her depression, walking new resident Ruth van Cleve back from NA. The street population gets filed flatly as "the undead" — addict-as-revenant diction — and then the shop windows do the rest, dissolving everyone into disembodied floating heads. Haunting rendered as perception: the city seen through It is already a ghost-parade.