Pages 827–845
Gately's bed in the St. Elizabeth's Trauma Wing, night into dawn — still mute, still refusing everything stronger than Toradol. Geoffrey Day visits and confesses; then the "ghostish" slumped figure that has been flickering at the edges of the last scene sits down bedside and talks, inside a dream Gately himself keeps noticing is a dream. The scene runs in long feverish paragraphs where dream, memory, and room bleed together; that porousness is the point. Plain heads-up: Gately's childhood memories here include sustained domestic violence and deliberate cruelty to insects, in close detail.
Terms, in order of appearance
- acciaccatura (p. 832) — real music term: a "crushed" grace note struck against its neighbor.
- Latrodectus mactans (p. 832) — real Latin name of the black widow spider; also a production-company name in endnote 24's filmography.
- Poor Yorick (p. 832) — Hamlet's dead jester ("Alas, poor Yorick"); likewise a company name from endnote 24.
- scopophilia (p. 832) — real term: pleasure taken in watching.
- De Sica (p. 832) — Vittorio De Sica, real Italian neorealist director.
- Bill W. (p. 833) — real: AA's co-founder; the "Pulsing Blue Light" refers to his celebrated detox vision.
- figurant (p. 834) — stage-and-film term the scene defines: background extra, seen but never heard.
- Heineken Maneuver (p. 835) — beer-soaked pun on the real Heimlich maneuver.
- Altman (p. 835) — Robert Altman, real director famous for crafted overlapping crowd-murmur; the wraith's negative example.
- White-Knuckle (p. 839) — endnote 343: Boston AA for trying to quit Substances without working any program.
After you read: three things
1. The wraith comes with rules — and a signature. It has no voice of its own: wraith thoughts "always just sound like your own thoughts, from inside your own head." It moves at the speed of quanta; being visible cost it months of stillness. And the proof this isn't fever: a roaring flood of words Gately couldn't possibly know — PIROUETTE, LATRODECTUS MACTANS, POOR YORICK, LAERTES — a "lexical rape." If you flipped endnote 24, you've seen two of those as Himself's production-company names. The wraith never introduces himself. The vocabulary does.
2. The figurant confession. From the mute background patrons of 'Cheers!' the wraith builds his term for a person demoted to human furniture, then applies it at home, to his "most marvelous and frightening" youngest son — "No horror on earth or elsewhere could equal watching your own offspring open his mouth and have nothing come out" — and spent his last ninety sober days on an entertainment meant as "A way to say I AM SO VERY, VERY SORRY and have it heard." Until now you've had the lethal cartridge only from outside (pp. 87–93, 787–795). Gately, knowing none of that, hears grandiose self-pity and tells him so.
3. What sobriety hauls up, and what waits in the hall. Between wraith-visits, abstinence forces memory on Gately: his mother's live-in ex-Navy M.P., the little Heineken notebooks, daily beatings Gately never once interrupted — volume up on 'Cheers!' — and the maimed flies the boy knelt over, listening for screams. At dawn, real White Flag visitors confirm the shape outside the door: tall, piggy-eyed, brown shoes, surrounded by takeout — the remorseless Revere A.D.A. from pp. 55–60. Gately mimes laughter at their jokes so they'll leave thinking they cheered him up.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.