Gately on Boston AA — "Gately had gotten the Diagnosis mixed…"
Gately had gotten the Diagnosis mixed up in his head with King Arthur. He’d ride a mop-handle horse and brandish a trashcan-lid and a batteryless plastic Light-Saber and tell the neighborhood kids he was Sir Osis of Thuliver, most fearsomely loyal and fierce of Arthur’s vessels. Since the summer now, when he mops Shattuck Shelter floors, he hears the Clopaclopaclop he used to make with his big square tongue as Sir Osis, then, riding.
Context
The child's memory-encoding of the unbearable — cirrhosis misheard into a knight — and its involuntary sensory return twenty years on: mopping the Shattuck at nine-plus months sober, he hears the Clopaclopaclop again. ("[V]essels," not vassals, is authorial — it completes the liver joke — as printed.)