Gately on Boston AA — "It’s like a lot of memories…"
It’s like a lot of memories of his youth sank without bubbles when he quit school and then later only in sobriety bubbled back up to where he could Get In Touch with them.
Context
The scene's governing image for the whole mechanism: memory as water-column. Childhood sank without bubbles — no trace on the surface, the drowning soundless — and in sobriety it bubbles, burples, dribbles back up, the verbs getting greasier as the material gets worse. The seed image is Lyle's "sinks without bubbles" at p. 128 (scene 039, in Texture); here it becomes the physics of suppression and return.