Gately's hospital visitors (pp. 809–810)
Gately kept having a terrible repetitious ethnocentric dream that he was robbing the house of an Oriental and had the guy tied to a chair and was trying to blindfold him with quality mailing twine from the drawer under the Oriental’s kitchen phone. The Oriental kept being able to see around the twine and kept looking steadily at Gately and blinking inscrutably. Plus the Oriental had no nose or mouth, just a smooth expanse of lower-facial skin, and wore a silk robe and scary sandals, and had no hair on its legs.
Context
Gately's first full night in St. Elizabeth's Trauma Wing, shot, mute, toxemic, the ceiling breathing like Herman. The recurring guilt-dream encodes his worst wreckage — the DuPlessis burglary, where the bound and gagged Québecois with the head cold suffocated: the victim returns with no nose or mouth at all, unsuffocatable and unblindfoldable, seeing steadily around every twine. The hat-shadow of the remorseless A.D.A. is already outside the door in the same paragraph.