Gately's Trauma Wing: the wraith and the M.P.
He’s remembering that he used to pretend to himself that the unviolent and sarcastic accountant Nom on ‘Cheers!’ was Gately’s own organic father, straining to hold young Bimmy on his lap and letting him draw finger-pictures in the condensation-rings on the bartop, and when he was pissed off at Gately’s mother being sarcastic and witty instead of getting her down and administering horribly careful U.S.-Navy-brig-type beatings that hurt like hell but would never bruise or show.
Context
While the wraith talks about human "figurants," Gately's mind supplies the theme's absent-father pole in its purest form: a boy so fatherless he cast one out of broadcast television, choosing a fat sarcastic bar- fly from 'Cheers!' to be the dad who'd hold him and never hit his mother. The tell is what the invented father is defined against — not warmth he had and lost but the M.P. he actually had, the "horribly careful" beatings that never bruised. Gately's father-hunger doesn't even reach for a real man; it reaches for a fictional one glimpsed through a screen, which is exactly (though Gately can't see it) the same channel through which the wraith beside him tried to reach his own son. Two fatherless imaginations, both routed through the entertainment box, meeting in one hospital room.