Gately mute in the Trauma Wing (p. 809)
The ceiling was breathing. It bulged and receded. It swelled and settled. The room was in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital’s Trauma Wing. Whenever he looked at it, the ceiling bulged and then deflated, shiny as a lung. […] The polyurethane bulged and settled in the North Shore wind and seemed like some monstrous vacuole inhaling and exhaling directly over little Gately, lying there, wide-eyed. The breathing polyurethane vacuole had seemed like it developed a character and personality as winter deepened and the winds grew worse. Gately, age like four, had regarded the vacuole as a living thing, and had named it Herman, and had been afraid of it. […] The hospital room had that misty quality rooms in fevers have. Gately lay on his back. Ghostish figures materialized at the peripheries of his vision and hung around and then de-materialized. The ceiling bulged and receded.
Context
Gately, shot defending Lenz, surfaces into his first full night at St. Elizabeth's, and the ceiling is breathing — Herman, the polyurethane vacuole he feared over his toddler crib, returned. This is the frame that makes the whole scene porous between fever and haunting: "Ghostish figures materialized… and then de-materialized" is delirium-diction, except that one of those figures turns out, a scene later, to have been real.