Pages 972–981
The book's final scene: ten pages, two layers. In the frame, Gately at St. Elizabeth's is "burning down" — fever spiking, ice bath ordered, doctors and visitors talking over him, "his input unrequired" — while his one conscious project stays what it has been: getting the word "addict" out, to go on refusing Demerol. The ice bath's plunge then drops him the rest of the way into the memory you've been inside since p. 934: dawn in the stripped apartment, the morning after the binge, when Bobby C comes through the window. Plain warning: the flashback holds the book's most brutal sequence — a torture done with needle and thread, and eyes.
Terms, in order of appearance
- confiteor (p. 972) — Latin, "I confess": the Mass's penitential prayer; Chandler's posture at the crib-rail.
- "Let's Try Doris" (p. 972) — endnote 385: Doryx, "the Cruise missile of gram-negative antibiotics."
- Taurus PT 9 mm. (p. 975) — real Brazilian-made pistol; C's.
- Narcan (p. 978) — endnote 386: naloxone, the injection that reverses an opiate overdose on the spot.
- Kurtzweil remixer (p. 978) — real studio electronics (Kurzweil); isolates single tracks out of a finished mix.
- Sunshine / Talwin-PX (p. 979) — endnotes 387–88: Canadian pharm-grade pentazocine; the U.S. "NX" version adds naloxone "to cut the buzz."
- the M.P. (p. 980) — Gately's mother's boyfriend, the ex-Military Policeman of his childhood memories.
- "the one about ultra-violence and sadism" (p. 980) — real film: Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, whose aversion scene clamps a viewer's eyes open.
After you read: three things
1. In the frame, one word and one visitor. "He kept trying to say addict" (p. 973) — refusing Demerol is the only act left to him, and nobody in the room requires his input. When somebody overhead asks somebody else if they're ready (p. 974), it's the same word that rode over his gurney on pp. 619–20. And the figure at the door "with his head bowed and his hat against his chest" (p. 974), whom Gately reads as praying he'll live long enough for Walpole — you sat through pp. 960–64; you know exactly how wrong that read is.
2. Read the party through Gately's arithmetic. "Sorkin's painting on the wall was symbolic of Sorkin wasn't coming" (p. 976): these are C's people, and Fackelmann is left to "face his own music." Gately, whom Whitey knows was never in on the scam, is handled almost tenderly — C "moving around him like a dancer to slow the fall" (p. 980) — and his share of the punishment is being gotten high: pharm-grade Sunshine — Talwin-PX, the Canadian, naloxone-free form of an old standby (p. 55 has him "favoring Demerol and Talwin"), a form he has never done — while Fackelmann is Narcan'd awake so he'll be present for what's done to him.
3. The mirrors, and the sentence after them. The two toughs return "holding big shiny squares of the room" (p. 981), and the last thing Gately sees in the apartment is "a reflection of his own big square pale head with its eyes closing as the floor finally pounced." Then a single sentence — a coming-to, a freezing beach, the tide way out — and the novel stops. No page, this one included, should tell you what to make of that. One thing you already hold, though: the opening chapter you read eleven hundred pages ago is dated Year of Glad — the year after this one.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.