Pages 934–938

Gately's bed · first-time reader guide · all scenes

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

The binge, from inside. You're still in the stripped luxury apartment on the North Shore where the last scene left off — Gately and Fackelmann in Fackelmann's corner, belts around their arms, working up the mountain of Dilaudid, under a wall-hung viewer looping slow-motion footage of nothing but flames. Trent Kite and Pamela Hoffman-Jeep each pass through once, early; after that it's the two men alone for what may be two days. All of it is Gately's memory, relived from his bed at St. Elizabeth's, and the prose moves the way the binge does — time gone to honey, exchanges distended — deliberately. It's a grim stretch: needles, urine, a convulsion, all rendered plainly.

Terms, in order of appearance

D.E.C. (p. 935) — Digital Equipment Corporation, real computer maker; the "nonportable D.E.C." is why Kite leaves trailing cables.
Phillips Screwdriver (p. 935) — endnote 377, one line: vodka and Milk of Magnesia; Gately privately calls it a "lowball."
Ciao Bello (p. 935) — Italian: roughly "bye, handsome."
Blues / Mt. Dilaudid (p. 935) — the 10-mg. Dilaudid tablets from last scene's haul; "the Blue Bayou" (p. 937) is the same pills.
ICBM (p. 936) — intercontinental ballistic missile; real hardware, here a measure of a binge's momentum.
Billerica Minimum (p. 937) — the minimum-security prison from Gately's criminal-career memory; at this point he hasn't been yet, out on bail Sorkin bonded.
hydromorphone (p. 937) — Dilaudid's generic pharmaceutical name; a real opioid, medically sweet-tasting.
laminates (p. 938) — fake-license blanks; the crew's ironing sideline you watched Gately work, in tears, two scenes back.

After you read: three things

1. Kite's exit sets the day's terms. Just before dawn, Kite — who regards Fackelmann as already a dead man, as you learned last scene — declines to get high, invents a "totally key" software trade-show "in a different area code," and leaves with every piece of hardware he owns (p. 935). Count what goes unanswered after that: the phone "rang and rang," the buzzer "buzzed and buzzed," and "the ringing was like an environment, not a signal" (p. 936). The last time the book shut a man in a room with a phone and a buzzer was Erdedy, pp. 17–27 — waiting on the Substance then, deep inside it now.

2. One paragraph is happening four years later. Mid-scene (p. 937), a bus-dream lifts Gately briefly out of the memory: "in his stuporous recall over four years later" at St. E.'s, his fever climbs and the heart-monitor line develops a serration that sets an amber light flashing down the hall. It's the scene's only visit to the hospital frame — one sentence that dates the binge, and tells you the remembering body in the present is getting worse.

3. The playpen is an image you've been given before. When Gately finally hauls himself up toward the buzzer — "reached in the dark for the bars of his playpen," "wobbled like a toddler" (p. 938) — the crib is loaded: the five-second crib-under-a-breathing-sky hallucination every Dilaudid shot gave him (p. 915), Herman the Ceiling That Breathed over his childhood crib (pp. 922–23), and present-tense Gately mute in a hospital bed "worse off than a toddler" (p. 923). Here the apartment ceiling bulges and breathes too.

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