Gately and the wraith — "the wraith’s father’s father, the blank…"

The wraith supplies the family-system's deep genealogy, and it's the same frozen-affect lineage Avril hands Mario in 154 — approached now from the other end. When the wraith tried to warn the family that his youngest was disappearing, they decided he was "confusing the boy with his own boyhood self, or with the wraith's father's father, the blank wooden man" who family mythology says "drove" the wraith's father to the bottle and an early hemorrhage. It's the multigenerational curse laid out as a chain: a blank wooden grandfather, a father driven to drink, the wraith who feared as a child he was becoming that blankness and then watched his own son become "what he had feared as a child he was." The Incandenza system isn't a snapshot — it's a transmission running down at least four generations, the frozen affect and the bottle handed forward, each man dreading he's become the wooden ancestor. What Avril files as harmless grandparental folklore (the St. Pamphile potato-farmer who felt nothing sober), the ghost narrates as the inheritance that produced the silence at the family's center.