Gately, the wraith, the figurants (p. 830)
But now not even moos or mews would come, all he could seem to do was pant real hard, as if the air was like totally missing his vocal box, or like his vocal box was totally demapped from nerve-damage in his shoulder and now just sort of hung there all withered and dry like an old hornet nest while air rushed out Gately’s throat all around it.
Context
Gately mid-wraith-visit, trying to yell for help and finding his voice gone. The idiom migrates from whole persons to a single organ: a "demapped" vocal box is one that's been erased from the body's working map, present as territory but deleted as function. The idiom's furthest semantic drift — demapping generalized from death to any loss of a thing's place in the schema — and it happens to the organ of self-report, in the book's great chapter about being unable to say who you are. ("vocal box" is Gately's dream-register, twice in the sentence.)