Gately's residency: the thing that was working

The payoff to the cake-box: the Removal happens — the Desire and Compulsion lifted from a man who "had been a total hypocrite in even asking something he didn't believe in" — and Gately's intelligence can only stand outside it, baffled. The sentence's whole force is in the collision of the two clauses: he cannot understand it, and it is working, and the understanding-mind's failure to parse the working changes the working not at all. Ferocious Francis closes the trap with the scene's sharpest line — that "maybe anything minor-league enough for Don Gately to understand probably wasn't going to be major-league enough to save Gately's addled ass from the well-dressed Sergeant at Arms." Understanding isn't the road to the thing; it's the obstacle. And by the theme's lights, irony — understanding weaponized — is the disease's last redoubt.