Fackelmann's scam and the wraith's return (p. 923)
Plus this dreadful time of weak gray late-day light is the time, was the time when the sad and nerdily dressed wraith appeared yesterday. Assuming that was yesterday. Assuming it was a real wraith. But the wraith, with its chinky Coke and theories of post-mortem speed, had been able to interface with Gately without aid of speech or gesture or Bic, was why even out of his mind Gately had had to admit to himself it must have been a delusion, a fever-dream. But he has to admit he’d kind of liked it. The dialogue. The give-and-take. The way the wraith could seem to get inside him. The way he said Gately’s best thoughts were really communiqués from the patient and Abiding dead. Gately wonders if his organic father the ironworker is not now maybe dead and dropping in and standing very still from time to time for a communiqué.
Context
The dread hour comes back around and Gately runs the delusion-test — but the very evidence for delusion (interface without speech, gesture, or Bic) is exactly how the wraith said wraiths work. "Communiqués from the patient and Abiding dead" is the book's theology of the dead in one line, and Gately half-accepts it, extending the doctrine to his own vanished ironworker father. ("Chinky Coke" is his crude shorthand for the first visit's foreign-script Coke can, p. 832.)