Gately's hospital visitors (p. 814)
Don, the other night, after the fracas and your display of reluctant se offendendo, after your injury and the whole aftermath… Don, I dreamed the whole mad repressed third-grade interval of grandiose perfidy all over again. Vividly and completely. When I awoke, I was somehow minus my goatee and my hair was center-parted in a fashion I haven’t favored for forty years. The bed was soaked, and there was a gnawed-looking cake of McDade’s special anti-acne soap in my hand.’
Context
The engine of Tiny Ewell's entire bedside aria: the Money-Stealers'-Club confession exists because a dream dredged the buried interval up whole — early sobriety's dreamwork doing exactly what Dream Duty (066) was chartered for, and physically remaking the dreamer overnight (goatee gone, boyhood part restored, the sick-day soap back in his hand). The unmarked ellipsis after "aftermath" is DFW's own, not a trim; the quote opens mid-speech, so there is no opening quote-mark in the raw; "se offendendo" carries n.337 (the Hamlet V.i gravedigger's botched Latin).