Joelle visits Gately: Abiding (p. 859)
Gately remembered some evil fucking personal detoxes. Broke in Malden. Bent with pleurisy in Salem. MCI/Billerica during a four-day lockdown that caught him short. He remembered Kicking the Bird for weeks on the floor of a Revere Holding cell, courtesy of the good old Revere A.D.A. […] Any one second: he remembered: the thought of feeling like he’d be feeling this second for 60 more of these seconds—he couldn’t deal. He could not fucking deal. He had to build a wall around each second just to take it. The whole first two weeks of it are telescoped in his memory down into like one second—less: the space between two heartbeats. A breath and a second, the pause and gather between each cramp. An endless Now stretching its gull-wings out on either side of his heartbeat. And he’d never before or since felt so excruciatingly alive. Living in the Present between pulses. What the White Flaggers talk about: living completely In The Moment. A whole day at a crack seemed like tit, when he Came In. For he had Abided With The Bird.
Context
The buried-treasure memory, and the theme's Abiding-by-memory anchor: while Joelle talks day-counting, Gately digs up the 92-day cold-turkey Bird in Revere Holding and finds Abiding already in it — he'd lived AA's whole doctrine years before he'd heard of AA, and only remembering it now makes it available as a survival skill for the dextral pain. Note what the faculty does to the ordeal in storage: two weeks "telescoped in his memory" into the space between two heartbeats — memory compressing time exactly as the Abiding itself did. Everything in 171-175 runs on this. (The tense shift "are telescoped" amid the past tense is as written.)