Gately's staff snippets (pp. 563–564)
‘Can I ask? Is your own personal Daddy still alive?’ ‘I dunno.’ ‘Oh. Oh. My mother’s dead. Worm-farming. My own personal Daddy’s still sucking air, though. That’s how he puts it—still sucking air. In Kentucky.’
Context
Two damaged inheritances laid side by side in four lines. Joelle asks after Gately's father and gets "I dunno" — not evasion but literal fact: the man is the never-met Estonian of 092, so absent that his own son can't say whether he's alive. And Joelle answers her own question with her living Daddy, the low-pH chemist of Shiny Prize, "still sucking air" in Kentucky. The scene sets the two patriarchies flush against each other — hers present and grotesque, his a total blank — and lets them read as the same wound in different registers, "absent and damaged patriarchy as common inheritance." That this is the intimacy Gately and Joelle build, comparing the fathers they got, is the point: the theme's two most father-starved characters recognize each other by the shape of the absence.