William Lee

William Lee is a heroin user, narrator, and fugitive agent whose trajectory connects the book’s street-level economies of addiction to its larger concerns with surveillance and the instability of identity. His escape from a police pickup at the Hotel Lamprey leaves Hauser and O’Brien dead, but it does not restore his freedom: in a later passage he describes himself as locked out of the present, while his withdrawal becomes a journey through time. Lee’s insistence that a writer records what is in front of the senses also makes his fragmented first-person voice part of the subject itself: a record of experience that declines to impose a continuous plot.

Identity and Background

Lee appears under more than one name and function. The narrative identifies him as William Lee and later describes Lee the Agent as taking a junk cure; elsewhere, the exterminating authority counts Lee among agents who have defected. He is therefore not simply a user pursued by police. He belongs to a covert world of agents and resisters, yet the lines dividing those roles are unstable: in the Exterminator’s formulation, agents defect and resisters sell out.

His long familiarity with heroin gives him a place in a network that crosses national borders. The account ranges among Yemen, Paris, New Orleans, Mexico City, and Istanbul, presenting users as linked through shared need and the circulation of drugs. Lee’s own connection in Mexico City is described as something he can locate by radar, an image that makes the search for a supplier seem at once practical and uncanny. In Houston, a druggist recognizes him after five years away, gives him a place to wait, and asks what he wants; Lee requests a quart of PG and a hundred nembies. The brief exchange shows how a remembered customer and a trusted point of supply can persist across years and distance.

Addiction, Trade, and Time

The narrative gives addiction a social infrastructure as well as a physical one. Users, suppliers, druggists, agents, and police occupy different parts of the same system, while the demand for a score organizes their movements. Lee’s Houston encounter rests on recognition rather than elaborate negotiation; elsewhere, a local user in Mexico obtains a government script that allows a fixed monthly quantity. Such details show that supply can depend on informal personal knowledge or on official channels, even as the surrounding account describes the drug economy as a network spreading across cities and countries.

That network also imposes its own measure of time. Lee describes junk time as governed by the body: need is the clock, and the drug moves through the body like sand through an hourglass. A customer may make an abrupt entrance into another person’s schedule, but otherwise has to wait; the trade has no dependable timetable, and a delivery arrives on time only by accident. Waiting is therefore not a pause outside the addiction but one of its ordinary conditions. The supplier’s delay and the user’s bodily urgency operate on different clocks.

Lee’s blunt assessment of recovery gives that temporal pattern a hard edge. When a boy asks whether he is leaving, Lee rejects the idea that milk sugar can undo dependence, stating that junk is a one-way street with no return. The remark is not a medical account of treatment; it is Lee’s declaration that the former state cannot simply be resumed. Later, the account calls his cure a space-time trip, linking withdrawal’s disorientation to the book’s recurring images of movement between temporal states.

Arrest and Escape

The decisive police confrontation begins at eight in the morning, when Hauser and O’Brien enter Lee’s room at the Hotel Lamprey. Their pickup has been ordered by a lieutenant, who gives Hauser the address and tells him to collect William Lee on the way downtown. The two officers are veterans of the City Narcotic Squad. Lee remembers them as an established pair: Hauser the tough one, O’Brien the talker. He does not describe either as simply monstrous, and says he did not want to kill them, but understands the arrest as his last chance to avoid becoming a subject for experiments.

The room’s arrangement makes the stakes immediate. Lee is preparing his morning injection; his packet of junk, syringe, alcohol, cotton, and water are on the table. The officers use a pass key that can open a door even when it is locked from inside with a key in the lock. Hauser has his gun out, a method Lee recognizes as intended to unsettle a suspect and prevent a sudden escape. The ordinary tools of Lee’s drug use are thus present at the moment the police take control of the room.

Lee turns the preparation into an opening. He throws a thin jet of alcohol into Hauser’s eyes, reaches for his suitcase and gun, and shoots Hauser before O’Brien can draw his weapon. He then shoots O’Brien and gathers his notebooks, drugs, syringe, and ammunition into a briefcase. He leaves wearing his coat and takes the self-service elevator down through the hotel’s empty lobby. Although the two men are dead, escape offers only a chance rather than security: Lee steps into an Indian summer day knowing that he may still be caught.

The scene is shaped by Lee’s first-person account, which places the reader inside the timing and decisions of the escape without making the violence a simple triumph. Hauser and O’Brien have pursued him as officers, but Lee remembers them as men with histories and recognizable habits. His action is driven by the prospect of state experimentation, not by a claim that he has defeated the institutions hunting him. The immediate result is escape from the hotel; the longer consequence is that his relation to the present and to the police becomes more precarious.

The Agent and the Problem of Identity

Lee’s account of interrogation methods reveals the institutional world his flight is meant to evade. Benway describes a technique based on an agent who has forgotten his real identity and merged with a cover story. Rather than contradicting the cover, the interrogator is to affirm it as the subject’s only identity, pushing the agent-self out of conscious control and then attempting to reach it through drugs and hypnosis. In this account, identity is not merely concealed information: it can be manipulated by controlling what a person is permitted to recognize as himself.

Benway also describes sexual humiliation as a means of conditioning and control, including constant supervision and punishments designed to prevent private relief. These procedures are presented as part of a wider repertoire of coercive interrogation, alongside drugs, hypnosis, and induced psychological distress. They clarify what Lee fears when he imagines capture and experimental treatment: the threat is not only confinement but the systematic appropriation of a subject’s body and self-understanding.

A separate examination of Carl Peterson shows the administrative language that can make such control sound benevolent. A doctor describes the state as a tool for adjusting conditions to individual needs, then compares sexual deviation to illness and argues that public-health obligations may require compulsory treatment. When Carl objects that he has always been interested in women and plans to marry, the doctor says this is precisely why he is being examined, proposing a blood test before marriage. The scene sets official assurances of minimal hardship against a procedure that treats a person’s private identity as a matter for state inspection. Together, these passages place Lee’s agency in a world where classification and coercion are closely connected.

Withdrawal, Recording, and the Ending

After the escape, Lee’s relationship to time changes in explicitly spatial terms. He realizes that he has been occluded from space-time, locked out of a key or point of intersection. The police heat, he says, is off him from then on, but the apparent relief carries a cost: he is relegated with Hauser and O’Brien to a landlocked junk past, where heroin remains fixed at twenty-eight dollars an ounce and yen pox can still be found in a Sioux Falls laundry. The escape does not return him to ordinary life; it places him on the far side of the world’s mirror, among obsolete arrangements and lost access.

The later description of Lee the Agent taking the junk cure makes that dislocation part of withdrawal. Past and future shuttle through his experience, while familiar corners associated with the junk encounter recur as points of recognition. A precinct cell and the taunting offer of heroin enter the sequence as impressions within the cure’s shifting temporal field. The narrative does not resolve this movement into a stable destination. It presents the cure as a state in which time is unsettled and the familiar drug economy continues to furnish its landmarks.

Lee’s account of writing offers a formal counterpart to this fractured experience. He says that a writer can write only what is in front of the senses at the moment of writing, calls himself a recording instrument, and rejects the imposition of story, plot, and continuity. That declaration is not separate from his characterization: it explains why his narration moves among arrest, addiction, memory, and reflections on control without smoothing them into a conventional sequence. The record’s discontinuity makes the reader encounter connections as intersections rather than as a single orderly line.

At the book’s broadest scale, Lee is one among a series of figures who may, at an intersection point, speak the same words and occupy the same position in space-time, becoming the same person through a shared vocal apparatus. The passage calls the junky naked in sunlight a more accurate expression of recognition than any stable name. Lee’s identity therefore remains both intensely particular—marked by his habits, contacts, flight, and voice—and vulnerable to absorption into a repeating collective figure. His escape from the hotel settles who leaves the room alive, but not who Lee can be, or whether any self remains wholly in its own possession.