Pages 883–896
The hospital again, sleet at the window, Gately's pain climbing and still untreated by his own choice. On the docket: a visit from his sponsor Ferocious Francis, oxygen tank in tow; a glossily cheerful Pakistani trauma M.D. with a strong professional opinion about that choice; and, at 1100h, Ennet House's Wade McDade and Gavin Diehl with news. One warning about the scene's method, consistent since p. 809: the fever narration doesn't mark where waking stops — watch the physical objects (a chair, a notebook, a bed-railing); they're how the scene keeps score of what actually happened.
Terms, in order of appearance
- OMMATOPHORIC (p. 884) — eye-stalked, as in snails; another capitalized ghostword Gately has "no rights to."
- Ethan From (p. 884) — Gately's version of Ethan Frome, the real Wharton novel he never finished in 10th grade.
- Oramorph SR (p. 886) — real brand: "just morphine sulfate with a fancy corporate name."
- Dilaudid (p. 886) — real opioid, hydromorphone; street "Blues," several times morphine's strength.
- Talwin (p. 886) — real opioid, pentazocine; Gately's old #2, "like floating in oil the exact same temperature as your body."
- Librium (p. 887) — endnote 359: "a low-grade Valiumish tranq," standard for detox discomfort.
- Percocet (p. 887) — endnote 360: the "entry-level oral narcotic"; its back-of-the-eyeball itch is what drove Gately up the ladder.
- Fleet (p. 895) — real brand of enema, here twirled gunslinger-style.
After you read: three things
1. Temptation arrives in a white coat, and the sponsor won't decide. The M.D. sings through the controlled-substance schedule — every name detonating memories of Fackelmann, Kite, dead Nooch Nucci — with flawless reasoning: genuine trauma, a devout-abstainer doctor, no God who "wills needless suffering." Ferocious Francis, mistaken for "Mr. Gately Senior" and not correcting it, offers only: "Kid's gonna do what he decides he needs to do for himself… Might want to Ask For Some Help, deciding." Gately stops the prescription at "mep—" with his one working hand, having "no other ideas for keeping the bastard from offering something Gately knows that he's powerless at this moment to refuse." The scream wakes him — and the room's objects tell you how much of that visit was real, and which earlier visitor certainly was.
2. The Demerol dossier cuts both ways. Even while Gately Abides and refuses to Entertain the craving, the narration lovingly anatomizes the buzz — "you sleep like a man of wax," pain reduced to "a theory" — then supplies the whole etiology: the first dose at 23 in the JFK Library lot, and the rent-and-strip apartment scam crewed with Gene Fackelmann and Trent Kite, who rated him "stand-up and jolly" off the nod but said narcotized Gately went so interior it was "like Gately shot cement." The seduction and the case against it, in the same voice.
3. The news tips him into rage at God. McDade and Diehl report: deposing for Gately would be "judicio-penal suicide," the .44 is gone — Lenz probably "promoted" it — and Lenz himself has been sighted, relapsed, in a back-split tux and sombrero. Nobody thinks to tell Gately what day it is. His theology cracks — "what if God is really the cruel and vengeful figurant Boston AA swears up and down He isn't" (note whose vocabulary that word is, from pp. 834–835) — and what answers the rage isn't insight but mortification: the gorgeous nurse, the bedpan, the Serenity Prayer, "Hug those knees like they were your Sweetie."
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.