The Fackelmann scam and the wraith's return (p. 923)
Plus this dreadful time of weak gray late-day light is the time, was the time when the sad and nerdily dressed wraith appeared yesterday. Assuming that was yesterday. Assuming it was a real wraith. But the wraith, with its chinky Coke and theories of post-mortem speed, had been able to interface with Gately without aid of speech or gesture or Bic, was why even out of his mind Gately had had to admit to himself it must have been a delusion, a fever-dream. But he has to admit he’d kind of liked it. The dialogue. The give-and-take. The way the wraith could seem to get inside him. The way he said Gately’s best thoughts were really communiqués from the patient and Abiding dead.
Context
Gately hits the gray late-afternoon hour he's dreaded all his life — the hour the wraith showed up "yesterday." His verdict on that first visit is the theme's epistemology in miniature: a thing that talks back and gets inside you has to be "a delusion, a fever-dream" — and yet he misses it, and half-adopts its doctrine of the patient dead. The dream-frame as Gately's tool for domesticating the impossible, which the wraith pair's return (p. 933) stress-tests.