Pages 193–198
A guided tour, no dateline: the Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital complex, the grounds Ennet House sits on — seven small leased buildings around a boarded-up VA hospital, looking from above like "seven moons orbiting a dead planet." The expository voice gradually settles into Don Gately's point of view, and en route you get his status quietly updated: the burglar of pp. 55–60 went through Ennet House as a resident and now lives in the cellar as paid live-in Staff. Flashbacks to his residency year carry the tour's stories. One of them ends with a murder in a prison bunk, told flat.
Terms, in order of appearance
- ATHSCME 2100 (p. 193) — the industrial air-displacement fan brand from pp. 52 and 61; here just a vantage height.
- methadone (p. 194) — real: the legal opioid dispensed daily to replace heroin; Unit #2 is its clinic.
- methedrine (p. 194) — real: a trade name for methamphetamine; "speed."
- Framingham Women's (p. 195) — real: MCI-Framingham, the Massachusetts women's prison.
- LTIs (p. 196) — initials only; the scene never expands them (long-term institutions, from context).
- The Shed (p. 196) — Unit #5's nickname, origin unknown even to Gately; endnote 67 is long and worth the flip.
- Green Line (p. 194) — real: Boston's trolley line, running below the ravine on Commonwealth Avenue.
- Visine and Clorets (p. 197) — real products, the relapse-concealment kit: eye-whitening drops and breath gum; same gear as the p. 39 crowd's.
After you read: three things
1. The map is a gradient — read the Unit numbers (pp. 193–197). They rise with distance from the dead hospital and proximity to the ravine: stress-counseling (#1, patrons exit worse), methadone (#2, patrons exit peaceful and glazed), a vacancy being readied for an unannounced "group misfortune" (#3), diapered Alzheimer's patients splayed at the windows (#4), catatonics (#5), Ennet House (#6), and the boarded relapse-house (#7) on the ravine's lip. Note the methadone line: fifty-some people "managing to appear alone" together — "isolation-in-union as balletic," the text's own hedge being only "if Don Gately had ever once seen a ballet."
2. Gately meets his own old joke from the other side. As a cynical new resident he hung CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE on the methadone clinic and watched the near-riot; now, as Staff, he's assigned to investigate the HELP WANTED sign under the shrieking nurse's window and can't press it — it's "so much like what he'd done himself, when new and cynical." Between the two: his prank partner's afterstory, discharged, jailed, "found one morning in her bunk" with "a thoroughly eliminated personal map," which his counselor invites him to read as There But For the Grace of God.
3. The hill above is E.T.A. (pp. 196–198). The "snooty tennis prep school overhead" whose sodium light spills onto the tree-touching catatonic; the fence residents hop for menial jobs at "the rich tennis school for blond gleaming tennis kids" — you saw these workers from above on p. 152, emptying E.T.A.'s wastebaskets. And the kicker: the Academy's contractors shaved the hilltop and nearly buried Unit #7 in debris, so E.T.A. "still has to pay full rent, every month, on what it almost buried."
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.