Pages 785–787
A dateline jump: it's now the morning of 17 November, five days after the brothers' night conversation. You're at Ennet House, in the front office, inside the head and diction of Johnette Foltz — Gately's young NA colleague, last seen on staff duty around pp. 461–470 — who has worked five straight overnight shifts "in Don Gately's medical absence" and is keeping herself awake with scalding coffee when somebody knocks at a door that has stood unlocked since 0800. The chapter's loose, run-on voice ("and everything like that") is hers, on almost no sleep.
Terms, in order of appearance
- Dream Duty (p. 785) — the overnight staff shift for residents' nightmares (explained back on pp. 273 and 359).
- the Law (p. 785) — endnote 322: Johnette's stepmother was a Chelsea cop; she was raised to say "police" or "the Law," never anything cuter.
- David Krone (p. 786) — a resident, new to you; what he does on the stairs is all the introduction the book gives.
- A.T.E. (p. 786) — the letters on the kid's woolly white jacket, red up one sleeve, gray up the other.
- The Ennet House (p. 787) — endnote 323: only outsiders say The Ennet House; the article marks somebody from beyond the community.
After you read: three things
1. The knock is the first tell. Ennet House's door is open to everybody but the Law from 0801; residents never knock, and never answer knocks. Johnette's precautions — the clipboard of residents with unresolved legal issues, ready to be hidden upstairs — are about police still deposing people over "the Lenz-and-Gately-and-Canadian fuck-up," the front-lawn catastrophe of pp. 601–619. The house you're re-entering is one running scared, without Gately.
2. The kid is never named — do your own placing. What Johnette registers: whitest-possible Nikes, ironed jeans, showered hair frozen upright, a jacket lettered A.T.E. in red and gray, a hyper-correct whom, and — the tell she knows "all too wicked well" — talk with "a burbly, oversalivated quality... of somebody who'd just lately put down the pipe and/or bong." A polite, emotionally emptied boy asking, in elaborately idle terms, to borrow and Xerox a schedule of Substance Anonymous meetings sounds a lot like the one who confessed on pp. 782–785 and predicted a Hal-sized hole. The scene leaves the name to you.
3. Addiction levels class absolutely. The chapter is built on the gulf between this upscale kid and Johnette Marie Foltz of South Chelsea — and then collapses it: his beautifully hedged request is "the exact same roundabout Denial shit as persons without teeth." The scene closes in a rare register, retrospect — "Much later, in subsequent events' light, Johnette F. would clearly recall" the melting hair, the whom, the saliva — the narrator dating this small minute from some later vantage the book doesn't show you here.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.