Fackelmann, Sunshine, and the beach (pp. 978–979)
somebody had taken an old disk of McCartney and the Wings—as in the historical Beatles’s McCartney—taken and run it through a Kurtzweil remixer and removed every track on the songs except the tracks of poor old Mrs. Linda McCartney singing backup and playing tambourine. […] her voice sounding so lost, trying to hide and bury itself inside the pro backups’ voices; Gately imagined Mrs. Linda McCartney—in his Staff room’s wall’s picture a kind of craggy-faced blonde—imagined her standing there lost in the sea of her husband’s pro noise, feeling low esteem and whispering off-key, not knowing quite when to shake her tambourine: C’s depressing CD was past cruel, it was somehow sadistic-seeming, like drilling a peephole in the wall of a handicapped bathroom.
Context
The scene's soundtrack is the figurant concept run on audio: a remixer strips away the foreground and promotes the buried backup voice to solo, exposing someone who was only ever meant to be background. It's the same operation the wraith's radical-aural-realism performs on figurants (162) and the same figure/ground inversion that made the voiceless WYYY broadcasts unbearable (093), here weaponized as ambience for a torture — and Gately's own simile for it is optical, "like drilling a peephole in the wall of a handicapped bathroom": exposure-by-apparatus of someone who couldn't consent to being heard or seen (the 162/093 linkage is our cross-reference; the raw gives the remix and the simile).