Gately, the wraith, and the figurants — "He wonders what something as brief…"
He wonders what something as brief as a car-horn-honk sounds like to a figurant that has to sit still for three weeks to be seen. Wraith, not figurant, Gately meant, he corrects himself.
Context
The concept takes: within minutes Gately is applying the borrowed term to his own world ("Patients in hospital-dramas were frequently unconscious figurants, Gately reflects") and then commits the scene's most eloquent slip — wraith and figurant have merged in his head, and the self-correction only confirms the equation the whole visit is built on: a wraith is a figurant's afterlife, a mute peripheral presence that must hold still for weeks to be seen at all. Gately's own situation completes the triangle: paralyzed, mute, "Don G. as huge empty confessional booth" — the Trauma Wing has made him a figurant too.