Gately, the wraith, and the figurants (pp. 839–840)
he simply concentrates on pretending to wonder to himself why the wraith is spending probably months of aggregate wraith-time flitting around a hospital room and making pirouetted demonstrations with crooner-photos and foreign tonic-cans on the ceiling of some drug addict he doesn’t know from a rock instead of just quantuming over to wherever this alleged youngest son is and holding very still for wraith-months and trying to have an interface with the fucking son. Though maybe thinking he was seeing his late organic dad as a ghost or wraith would drive the youngest son bats, though, might be the thing. The son didn’t exactly sound like the steadiest hand on the old mental joystick as it was, from what the wraith’s shared.
Context
Gately asks the reader's question — why haunt a stranger instead of the son? — and supplies the answer the book endorses: a dead father's ghost is exactly what the fragile son couldn't survive seeing. Carlisle seconds the surmise, with the dry aside that "(one could question whether this happened to Hamlet)" — the play's ghost did appear to the son, with known results; recorded, not adopted.