empathy with no words and no reply
he sometimes wakes up in his Staff cellar bedroom down by the pay phone and tonic machine and looks out the sooty ground-level window by his bed and watches the catatonic touching the tree in her sheet and glasses
Context
The one act of contact Gately manages here is entirely mute and entirely one-way: through a sooty window, unseen, he watches a catatonic woman touch a tree in the dark and feels a chilled empathy he cannot say and she cannot receive. It is connection stripped to the last thing left when speech is impossible, a reaching toward a person who will never know she was reached toward, routed through glass and silence and a grief about his own mother he would rather not name.