The Fackelmann scam and the wraith's return (p. 922)

quote

they were leaving him trapped in himself, a figurant, mute and unmoving and blank like the House’s catatonic lady slumped moist and pale in her chair or the Advanced Basics Group’s adopted girl’s vegetable-kingdom sister, or the whole catatonic gang over at E.M.P.H.H.’s #5 Shed, silent and dead-faced even when touching a tree or propped up amid exploding front-lawn firecrackers. Or the wraith’s nonexistent kid.

Context

Gately's paranoid theory for why no pen and paper have come ends in an inventory of the book's catatonics, with himself filed among them — primarily a communication-solipsism passage, but it's the theme's catatonia thread surfacing inside Gately's own head.

Quoted from

Scene 175: fackelmann scam wraith returns

In anthology

Depression and Anhedoniatexture