Fackelmann, Sunshine, and the beach (pp. 979–980)
When Gately could look away from the stuff going in, he saw the librarian-type lady was sewing Fackelmann’s eyelids open to the skin above his eyebrows. […] He understood they’d given Fackelmann the anti-narc so he’d feel [p. 980] the needle as they sewed his eyes open. […] The corporate-tool type was dropping fluid from a pipette into Fackelmann’s sewed-open eye while the lady rethreaded the needle. It was just seeming to Gately he’d seen the fluid-in-eye thing in a cartridge or movie the M.P.’d liked when he was a Bim playing ball on the chintz in the sea when the Sunshine crossed the barrier and came on.
Context
The climax as staged optics, per the plan's one-liner: Fackelmann's execution is built as a viewing apparatus — eyelids sewn open, Narcan administered specifically so the sewing is felt, eyedrops keeping the forced-open eye functional. The punishment is compulsory spectation; whatever they mean him to watch, the sentence is you will see. And Gately, mid-boot, recognizes the setup as cinema — "he'd seen the fluid-in-eye thing in a cartridge or movie" — the recognition arriving from a childhood viewing memory at the exact moment the drug takes him under. In the book's terms this is the Entertainment's logic inverted: there a film no viewer can look away from, here a viewer surgically deprived of looking away (inversion inferred; the raw gives the apparatus and the memory).