The Fackelmann scam; the wraith returns

Gately's fever-dreams in the trauma ward, one sentence in a "dismantled cubist" series: the mirror that returns nothing, and the dreamer's response — not horror but housekeeping, wiping the glass as if the missing reflection were a smudge. The theme's mirror thread runs on mirrors that show too much (AA's mirror "hauled out in front of" newcomers, 166; the appearance-check mirrors; the A.F.R.'s roadside mirrors); this is its inversion, a mirror with no self in it at all, dreamed by the man who's just spent the scene Identifying with Fackelmann's need to "blot out." The adjacent dream in the same passage — the graveyard, the sad kid, the head — is catalogued under Heads & skulls, not under this theme; only the mirror-void sentence is the film-optics sighting.