Joelle visits Gately: moo or mew

Sincerity conducted past a disabled irony-organ. With a tube down his throat Gately can only mew, grunt, hike eyebrows, heave his chest — and the incapacity strips out the option of verbal irony entirely, forcing all his communication into pure single-entendre gesture: a chest-heave for amusement, an eyebrow-hike to make her smile, a hand laid on her wrist to ask her to write. He can't hedge, can't deflect, can't wrap anything in tone; the body that can't speak also can't be ironic, and what's left is naked signal. The register war won by default when the irony-organ is out of order — while Joelle, still able, keeps her own residual distance with "a mental thumb to pretend to look at while she talks," the intellectualish arm's-length Gately's tube has made impossible for him.