Ferocious Francis Gehaney

Arc

Ferocious Francis Gehaney is the novel's answer to the question of what decades of sobriety are actually for, and the answer is deliberately unglamorous: they are for sitting in a chair, sucking canned oxygen, and not saying anything. Everything quotable about him — the parachute, the Librium over the left shoulder, "Live it up!" yelled from the LeSabre at the relapsed — is comedy with a working theology folded inside: the suggestions are optional the way a parachute is optional; luck is what you call the thing you obeyed before you understood it. His own body is the doctrine made visible. The oxygen tank and taped tube "were not his personal will"; he "submitted to advice," and now here he is, still sucking air — a man wearing his surrendered will on his face, under a nose the narration lovingly ruins.

His sponsorship of Gately runs on empathy that never once becomes rescue. At the coffee shop he does not explain God; he demolishes the demand for explanation with one line and lets it work. On the ride home from Braintree, where Gately has just confessed to a hall full of strangers the doubts he could never say to Francis man to man, Francis — who plainly heard every word — offers only the toothpick and the rearview mirror: presence, witness, zero comment. Even his teaching runs backward from expectation: the newly sober are the ones fit to identify with newcomers, because the Crocodiles live in a different spiritual galaxy inside — an admission, cheerfully made, that his own kind of survival puts him past certain kinds of usefulness.

That is why the Trauma-Wing dream is the arc's crown and one of the book's great moral scenes. The wraith promises "unconditional empathy and fellowship and acerbic Crocodilian counsel," and a Francis delivers exactly that — the cough-hello, the gossip, the needling about playing God on the street — right up to the moment the M.D. starts selling Demerol to a mute addict, at which point the counsel becomes silence. "And Francis isn't making a peep." But the visit is a dream: narrated as waking fact for six pages, it dissolves when Gately's dream-fist closes on the M.D. and the scream wakes him to the visitor-chair back against the wall — no waking visit from Francis anywhere in the book. What the dream stages is still the sponsorship, played note-perfect from inside: the sponsor who once submitted to a tube will not do another man's surrendering for him, because a surrender performed on your behalf is not a surrender at all. The dream-Francis leaves the decision in the one place it can mean anything — "He's the one that's feeling it. He's the only one can decide" — and then, from the hallway, hands Gately the only tool the real one ever offered: "Might want to Ask For Some Help, deciding." The M.D. mistakes him for Gately's father, and the Crocodile doesn't correct the misimpression; the book quietly lets it stand as the truest thing anyone says in the scene — by now, the father-voice is coming from inside Gately's own head.