Pages 846–851
Still Gately's Trauma Wing bed, a night or so on — but almost none of the scene happens in the room. Two pain-and-fever dreams, both starring a veiled Joelle van Dyne, bracket one sober, involuntary childhood memory: Mrs. Waite, the shunned old neighbor from Gately's North Shore boyhood, who is new here and gets her whole story inside these pages. No one visits; nothing advances; the scene is interior from end to end.
Terms, in order of appearance
- Winston Churchill (p. 847) — the real British P.M.; the cigar, jowls, and "bulldog scowl" are the dream's punchline.
- Mrs. Waite (p. 847) — the neighborhood "witch" of Gately's childhood; first and only extended appearance.
- eliminated her own map (p. 848) — the book's street idiom: map = face, life; the phrase means she killed herself.
- Chinette (p. 849) — real brand of sturdy paper plates; the neighborhood's shared-birthday standard.
- Benson & Hedges 100s / Store 24 (p. 850) — real cigarettes, real New England convenience chain; "promoted" is Gately's lifelong word for shoplifted.
After you read: three things
1. The veil runs both ways. In the first dream Joelle undresses to "a body like something you'd win in a raffle," then lifts the veil onto "the unveiled historical likeness of fucking Winston Churchill." In the second she's unveiled from the start and the face is "like all the world's light had gotten together and arranged itself into the shape of a face." Grotesque or angel — the dreams stage both answers to what's under the U.H.I.D. veil, and Gately's terror is not knowing which.
2. The cake is the sober center. "Gately's also powerless over memories": Mrs. Waite, who gave up cigarettes for weeks to afford it, carries a tilted chocolate cake across the street for the neighborhood birthday party — four names in cursive, because she "had spared Gately the humiliation of putting just his name on the cake as if the cake was especially for him. But it was." His mother takes it at the door, quarantines it in the garage, and throws it away. Weeks after, Mrs. Waite hangs herself. The boy's only amends: two promoted packs of Benson & Hedges left in her mailbox. Notice what sobriety does here — it's the abstinence that lets this surface at all.
3. You've heard Death's doctrine before; Gately hasn't. In the second dream Joelle-as-Death patiently explains that the woman who kills you "is always your next life's mother," and that mothers' obsessive love is "amends for a murder neither of you quite remember, except maybe in dreams." That is, nearly word for word, what Molly Notkin told the interviewers the Entertainment contains (pp. 788–789) — a film Gately has never seen or heard of. The scene doesn't say how it got into his head; it's worth remembering who was interfacing with his sleep in the previous scene. It ends with Gately asking Death to set him free and be his mother, and Joelle "either shakes or nods her lovely unfocused head and says: Wait."
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.