The Ennet House living room: Day and Gately — "Burt F. Smith is also in…"
Burt F. Smith is also in there, way down by himself at the table’s far end, trying to saw at a waffle with a knife and fork attached to the stumps of his wrists with Velcro bands. […] Burt F.S. got mugged and beaten half to death in Cambridge on Xmas Eve of last year, and left there to like freeze there, in an alley, in a storm, and ended up losing his hands and feet.
Context
Gately's morning scan of the House: the apparatus first (Velcro bands, the sawing, the pruning-shears cigarette grip), then the history that produced it — the Xmas Eve mugging that was, per the adopted loop-closure, C and yrstruly's work back in scene 040, victim and perpetrators now threaded through the same recovery world. And the full spectrum of the able gaze in three sentences: Gately's helpless pathos, Day's ironic one-liner, the unwatchable match left to the imagination.