the man everyone talks at, who cannot ask — "he's mute and powerless over Thrust…" · S2

The figurant condition turned inside out and made unbearable: shot, raped-throated, unable to make a sound, Gately lies while a parade of visitors talks at him — and the discovery is that the muteness is worse than the gunshot. Not being able to ask a single question, to get one word of input into what's being decided about his life and his legal fate, produces a drowning panic that literally dwarfs the physical agony. He can only blink and mew; the surrender the scene arrives at is a surrender to speechlessness itself, mute and powerless in a room full of people speaking. [sweep · shared-ground addiction-recovery]