Hal and Pemulis on DMZ and quitting (pp. 1065–1066)
Most nothing big happened, that needed it and quit. They got up and went to work and came home and ate and went to sleep and got up, day after day. But dead. Like machines; you could almost see the keys in their backs. You looked into their maps and something was gone. The walking dead. They loved it so much they needed it and gave it up and now they were waiting to die. Something was all over, inside.
Context
Hal has floated quitting everything — "maybe make a decision. Forever" — and Pemulis answers with his Allston casebook of guys who needed it and white-knuckled it anyway. The map-as-face idiom turns diagnostic instrument: you look into a map and read what's missing from the interior it stands for — the surface still walking around after the territory inside has died. The bleakest single extension of the book's cartography-of-self figure, and it's aimed straight at Hal three days into his own withdrawal.