Gately, the wraith, and the figurants — "The wraith feels along his long…"
The wraith feels along his long jaw and says he spent the whole sober last ninety days of his animate life working tirelessly to contrive a medium via which he and the muted son could simply converse. To concoct something the gifted boy couldn’t simply master and move on from to a new plateau. Something the boy would love enough to induce him to open his mouth and come out—even if it was only to ask for more. Games hadn’t done it, professionals hadn’t done it, impersonation of professionals hadn’t done it. His last resort: entertainment. Make something so bloody compelling it would reverse thrust on a young self’s fall into the womb of solipsism, anhedonia, death in life. A magically entertaining toy to dangle at the infant still somewhere alive in the boy, to make its eyes light and toothless mouth open unconsciously, to laugh. To bring him ‘out of himself,’ as they say. The womb could be used both ways. A way to say I AM SO VERY, VERY SORRY and have it heard. A life-long dream. The scholars and Foundations and disseminators never saw that his most serious wish was: to entertain.
Context
The Entertainment's apologia from the auteur's own ghost: the lethal cartridge as a father's last-resort medium for conversation, an apology engineered to be compelling enough to get heard. It squares with and deepens Molly Notkin's secondhand account (scene 159), and it's the passage Carlisle builds his strongest commentary on — the film read all book as a regression-machine was intended as the reverse, the womb "used both ways" (his open question: "Does this make sense, or was Jim insane?"). Spine of the theme and of the novel.