Joelle visits Gately: Abiding — "And soon it would get… improbable…"
And soon it would get… improbable. As if each day was a car Knievel had to clear. One car, two cars. By the time I’d get up to say like maybe about 14 cars, it would begin to seem like this staggering number. Jumping over 14 cars. And the rest of the year, looking ahead, hundreds and hundreds of cars, me in the air trying to clear them. […] Who could do it? How did I ever think anyone could do it that way?
Context
The day-counting fallacy made image: Joelle's white-knuckle quits always failed because accumulated sober days turn into Evel Knievel's row of cars — every day added makes the jump longer, until the future is hundreds of cars and you're in the air over all of them at once. It's the exact inverse of Kate Gompert's "the seconds keep coming on and on": there the units of torture arrive one by one; here they line up ahead and crush by aggregation. (Gately, listening, has an actual Life-magazine cutout of Knievel aloft on his wall at Ennet — the coincidence the scene runs on.)