the Fackelmann execution, eyes sewn open

The absent authority presides as a screen-image, a mute pained god on the viewer. The execution runs under a cartridge that is just a still portrait of Whitey Sorkin mid-cluster-headache, so his contorted face looks down from the wall "presiding over the gathering in a mute pained way" — and Gately reads the image correctly: the portrait means Sorkin isn't coming, that he's given Bobby C "free rain," that the presiding face on the screen is precisely the sign of the real presence's absence. It's a small dark parody of the Entertainment's whole theology: a face on a screen standing in for a power that will not appear, the watchers governed by an image of an absence. The god of this room is a picture on a viewer, painful and silent and not actually there, which is exactly the relation the era has to every screen it kneels before.