Pages 442–449

Y.D.A.U. — Gately at the podium · first-time reader guide · all scenes

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

Back to Gately, and back a few months: this past July, at a speaker Commitment to a biker-heavy AA group in Braintree, then the ride home with Ferocious Francis and the Crocodiles, then what sobriety has started doing to his memory. Everyone named here you've met at the White Flag meeting except Bob Death, a young biker, introduced on the spot. One plain heads-up, because the second half earns it: as the anesthetic of using wears off, Gately's childhood surfaces — his mother's drinking, and beatings she took from her live-in boyfriend, remembered in close detail.

Terms, in order of appearance

Commitment (p. 442) — AA custom: one group travels to speak at another's meeting; the machinery was laid out around pp. 343–345.
Crocodiles (p. 443) — White Flag's ancient long-sobriety contingent, from the pp. 343–367 meeting; Ferocious Francis is Gately's.
hawg (p. 444) — biker slang: a Harley-Davidson.
Hennessey (p. 445) — real cognac; Glenn K.'s joke material.
the M.P. (p. 446) — military policeman; her ex-Navy live-in was once a brig (Navy jail) guard.
Stolichnaya (p. 446) — real Russian vodka; "the Stoli" is the house supply Gately monitors.
Point Shirley (p. 447) — real spit of land in Winthrop, off Boston Harbor; the Long-Term Medicaid place is there.
Nimitz (p. 448) — the kitty; Chester Nimitz was a real WWII fleet admiral.
Doshka (p. 448) — her drunk endearment for him; the scene never translates it, and the name is all you get.
cirrhosis (p. 449) — real end-stage liver scarring from drinking: the Diagnosis, the yellow, the hemorrhage at seventeen.
Sir Osis of Thuliver (p. 449) — the Diagnosis knighted by a nine-year-old: say it aloud, cirrhosis of the liver.

After you read: three things

1. A confession that works without belief. Ten months clean, Gately tells a basement of bikers he has no Higher Power at all — past the rote knees-at-dawn and knees-at-night routine there's "not nothing but Nothing" (p. 443). He prays anyway, "whether he believes he's talking to Anything/-body or not," and the days come out clean. Watch the crowd: the more completely he confesses failure, the harder they thank him.

2. The water. Bob Death — a biker who uses words like share without irony — leans off his idling hawg and shouts a parable: an old fish asks "'Morning, boys, how's the water?'" and the young fish go "'What the fuck is water?'" (p. 445). Hold it to the scene's last sentence, that night's dream: Gately under a sea, the water "silent and dim and the same temperature he is." The parable and the dream bracket everything between.

3. Through, not around. Page 446 states what nobody mentions when you Come In: "the way it gets better and you get better is through pain. Not around pain, or in spite of it." Then the scene demonstrates it — at eight-plus months the remembering starts unbidden: the Stolichnaya level he monitored at eleven, the "wake-up swallow" he always left her (and what leaving it really maintained), the M.P.'s methodical, hidden blows. Endnote 178's one-liner is worth the flip.

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