Gately in the Trauma Wing (pp. 824–825)

Buried in Calvin Thrust's news-dump from the House is a drowning that rhymes, quietly, with the frame the sickroom keeps invoking. A four-years-sober AA alum takes The First Drink the day of the Lenz fracas, gets "totally shitfaced," walks off the end of the Fort Point pier and "sank like a rock" — memorial service today. It's a throwaway in a paragraph about towed cars and eviction bags, and that offhandedness is the point: an Ophelia-shaped death (the water, the drink, the ambiguous walk off the pier) delivered as gossip, the way the whole novel lets its Hamlet motifs drift in at the periphery of scenes about something else. The gravedigger's V.i is next door in the se-offendendo slip; here is V.i's drowning, sixty pages of the same hospital vigil apart.