The Fackelmann scam and the wraith's return — "Little entr’actes of feverish dreams punctuate…"
Little entr’actes of feverish dreams punctuate memories and being conscious, like. He dreams he’s riding due north on a bus the same color as its own exhaust, passing again and again the same gutted cottages and expanse of heaving sea, weeping. The dream goes on and on, without any kind of resolution or arrival, and he weeps and sweats as he lies there, stuck in it.
Context
The fever breaks Gately's Fackelmann memories into "entr'actes" of dream, and the first is the unending gray bus: due north, the same gutted cottages, the same heaving sea, no arrival, ever. This is the dream 177's PARAGON nod-dream will turn out to connect to — with the connection itself then diagnosed as a dream — so the two passages form one two-part system, the Gately dream-cycle's grimmest image: recurrence with no destination.