Withdrawal itself: "The Old Cold Bird" (Poor Tony)

texture · 14 Nov YDAU

• When: 14 November YDAU (the day of the seizure, after over a week hidden in the men's room of the Armenian Foundation Library, Watertown)
• What: The definitive portrait of Withdrawal as the disease's other terminal face — the state the recovery apparatus (detox, event 7) is built to catch. Cut off from any way to cop, Poor Tony Krause Withdraws From Heroin (the Wingless Fowl, Turkeyfication, "The Old Cold Bird"), then compounds it Withdrawing from the grain alcohol and codeine in his Codinex cough syrup, until "time had become the shit itself" and a seizure fells him on the Gray Line. The passage is the thread's unflinching anatomy of what Coming In (events 9-10) is a flight from — withdrawal without a program, a Higher Power, or a hand; the continuity holds to the end (discharged from Cambridge City Hospital on the 14th, he goes straight back to predation, 133, and is last seen as an A.F.R. Entertainment test-subject alongside the relapsed Lenz, ev23). See the Poor Tony / U.S.O.U.S. street material (his artificial-heart snatch, scene 045, folded here).