White Flag: the smily-face angler
an extraordinarily snappily dressed and authoritative figure manipulating the giant shepherd’s crook with one hand and coolly examining the nails of his other hand from behind a mask that was simply the plain yellow smily-face circle that accompanied invitations to have a nice day.
Context
Gately's "banally trite" epiphany-dream literalizes the register war as a hunting scene. The kneeling assembly is held down not by any in-hall enforcer but by a figure Out There, "snappily dressed," coolly self-assured, doing his nails while he trolls a hook through them — and his face is the have-a-nice-day smily-face, the Disease's ironic mask again, now worn by the angler who "isn't going to throw back anything he catches." The dream's tritely obvious reading (which Gately doesn't even need Dream Duty to decode) is that "Boston AA's Sergeant at Arms" is the smiling seduction of relapse, whose "blank black-on-yellow smile never faltered as he sincerely urged you to have a nice day. Just one more last nice day. Just one." Cool, charming, impressive — every attribute of hip irony — rendered as the mask of the thing dragging people out through the glass.