Kate Gompert in the psych ward — "Well how about either give me…"
Well how about either give me ECT again, or give me my belt back. Because I can’t stand feeling like this another second, and the seconds keep coming on and on.
Context
Kate Gompert, 21, three days after nearly dying of a meds O.D., telling the psych resident what she actually wants. This is the smallest possible statement of the book's whole time problem: when the feeling is It, the second becomes the unit of torture, and the torture is that the units don't stop arriving. Everything Abiding will later have to answer (069 → 166) is already compressed into this sentence.