The flight and the death-binge: hiding in the Blues

timeline_event

pivotal · Fackelmann finale (~4 yrs before YDAU)

When: the days immediately after the scam; "for the last two weeks Fackelmann had been squatting sweatily in a corner"
What: Faced with certain death, Fackelmann did what "any drug addict in possession of his Substance would do" — he "made a fucking beeline for their luxury-stripped home and familiar safe-feeling hearth," fired up the Sterno, and buried himself under a mountain of Dilaudid and Peanut M&M's, squatting "hunched and plump and glistening like some sort of cornered toad" to blot out the reality of his coming demapping. Gately (leaving Pamela swooned in the bedroom) lumbered out under the pretense of talking sense into him and instead let Fackelmann fix them both up and joined the binge — his epiphany that a drug addict is "at root a craven and pathetic creature: a thing that basically hides." (Gately-altitude: Gately's timeline (event 21).)