Pages 55–60

Y.D.A.U. — the pump room · first-time reader guide · all scenes

When you've finished these pages: three things worth a second look, at the bottom.

A new header — AUTUMN, YEAR OF DAIRY PRODUCTS FROM THE AMERICAN HEARTLAND — a fifth sponsored year, position in the sequence unstated. Upscale Brookline, Massachusetts, with a warm-up flashback to Revere: enter Don Gately, twenty-seven, oral-narcotics addict and "more or less professional burglar," the size of a young dinosaur, narrated in long comic-essayistic sentences that keep making general laws out of his particulars. Plain heads-up, because the scene doesn't flinch: it ends with a bound man suffocating slowly, at length, on the page.

Terms, in order of appearance

Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland (p. 55) — the fifth sponsored year so far.
Demerol and Talwin (p. 55) — real prescription painkillers; endnote 12 grades them on this world's drug schedule.
North Shore / Revere / Marblehead (p. 55) — real coastal geography just north of Boston.
straight shunt (p. 55) — jumping a meter's inflow to kill a house's power; called Gately's "signature M.O." by p. 59.
NyQuil (p. 57) — real cold syrup; endnote 17 notes exactly what a narcotics man notices about this particular bottle.
apocopes (p. 57) — lopping the ends off words ("talkin'"); how criminals speak "in popular entertainment."
post-feral-hamster meadow (p. 58) — a simile the book declines to explain; feral hamsters, apparently, strip meadows bare.
Great Concavity / Great Convexity (p. 59) — one region, two names in a single sentence: some territorial "gift" from the U.S. to Canada. The names are all the scene gives.
Experialistic (p. 59) — coinage: imperialism in reverse — forcing territory onto a neighbor; the sentence's own "'gift' or 'return'" is the clue.
P.I.T. (p. 59) — endnote 19 unpacks the French; a one-line flip with a punchline.

After you read: three things

1. You already hold both names. Don Gately: last seen before he ever appeared, in Hal's stretcher-vision — "Donald Gately and I dig up my father’s head" (p. 17). And the dying homeowner, Guillaume DuPlessis (p. 59): "the pan-Canadian Resistance’s notorious M. DuPlessis" was an item in the conversationalist's rant (p. 30) — which means the rant had at least one real name in it. The scene waves at neither; the placing is yours to do.

2. What kills DuPlessis is need plus deafness, not malice. The scene's opening law: addicts burgle, they don't fight. The pivot comes when a laughable wall-safe meets an addict "firmly in the need part of the schedule" (p. 57). Then the blackest version yet of the book's unheard-speech problem: DuPlessis cooperates fully — combination, hidden coins, the desperate warning about his blocked nose — all in Québecois French that means no more to Gately "than the cries of, say, North Shore gulls" (p. 58). Perfectly spoken; perfectly unreceived.

3. The death-sentence is built to interrupt itself. DuPlessis dies inside one enormous sentence (p. 59) that keeps cutting away — to his covert V.I.P. résumé, to a gum-chewing tanning-coupon canvasser at the door — while the man himself thinks only "what a truly dumb and silly way this was, after all this time, to die." Bathos and agony run in the same syntax. And clock the exit line: Gately is now in the kind of mess "that can turn a man’s life right around" (p. 60) — a self-help idiom doing very un-self-help work.

Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.