Gately down: 'And Lo'

The scene closes on an unguarded sincerity from its other great ironist. Joelle — veiled, brilliant, the woman whose subjunctive-parsing armor filled scene 074 — drops all of it here into a plain tending gesture and two soft liturgical words, "And Lo," a benediction with no wink in it. It arrives alongside Gately's equally plain recognition, "You're Madame on the FM, is how I knew you": two people who spend the book at ironic distance meeting, at the moment of maximum bodily emergency, in total single-entendre directness. Her competence goes unironic and practical ("Madame Psychosis is in charge"), and the tenderness is stated without hedge. The register the whole anthology argues toward — sincerity as risk and practice — is what surfaces when the veil, briefly, stops mattering.