the conversation happens over him, his input unrequired · S1

Gately burning down with fever, ringed by bedside industry, and the one thing his failing attention keeps registering is that all the talk in the room is about him and none of it is to him — the twelve-year-old-looking M.D. issues orders over his body, the overhead voices confer, and his "input unrequired." It is the passive, clinical form of the same exclusion the book keeps staging: a person fully present and fully addressed-around, reduced to the topic of a conversation he is not admitted to.