Joelle visits Gately, Abiding
he feels on top of the febrile pain and the creepiness of the amphetaminic-wraith- and Winston-Churchill-face-Joelle-and angelic-maternal-Death-Joelle-dreams an odd vividness in himself at being swabbed and maybe even generally admired by someone who’s an underground local intellectual-dash-art-type celebrity.
Context
The morning after: the real Joelle at the bedside with a cool cloth, and the whole wraith-night compressed into one hyphenated inventory filed under mere "creepiness" — the only processing the visitation gets before daily life resumes. (The compound's inconsistent suspended-hyphen spacing is the text's.)