Gately, the wraith, and the figurants — "holds one knee to its sunken…"
holds one knee to its sunken chest and starts doing what Gately would know were pirouettes if he’d ever once been exposed to ballet, pirouetting faster and faster and then so fast the wraith’s nothing but a long stalk of sweatshirt-and-Coke-can-colored light that seems to extrude from the ceiling; and then, in a moment that rivals the Coke-can moment for unpleasantness, into Gately’s personal mind, in Gately’s own brain-voice but with roaring and unwilled force, comes the term PIROUETTE, in caps, which term Gately knows for a fact he doesn’t have any idea what it means and no reason to be thinking it with roaring force, so the sensation is not only creepy but somehow violating, a sort of lexical rape. […] Other terms and words Gately knows he doesn’t know from a divot in the sod now come crashing through his head with the same ghastly intrusive force, e.g. ACCIACCATURA and ALEMBIC, LATRODECTUS MACTANS and NEUTRAL DENSITY POINT, CHIAROSCURO and PROPRIOCEPTION and TESTUDO and ANNULATE and BRICOLAGE and CATALEPT and GERRYMANDER and SCOPOPHILIA and LAERTES—and all of a sudden it occurs to Gately the aforethought EXTRUDING, STRIGIL and LEXICAL themselves—and LORDOSIS and IMPOST and SINISTRAL and MENISCUS and CHRONAXY and POOR YORICK and LUCULUS and CERISE MONTCLAIR and then DE SICA NEO-REAL CRANE DOLLY and CIRCUMAMBIENTFOUNDDRAMALEVIRATEMARRIAGE and then more lexical terms and words speeding up to chipmunkish and then HELIATED and then all the way up to a sound like a mosquito on speed, and Gately tries to clutch both his temples with one hand and scream, but nothing comes out.
Context
The theme's dark centerpiece. Gately — bedridden, intubated, mute in the Trauma Wing — has JOI's entire C.V. forced through his own brain-voice in caps: the production companies (LATRODECTUS MACTANS, POOR YORICK), the optics (CHIAROSCURO, SCOPOPHILIA, MENISCUS), the physics (ANNULATE), the film vocabulary (DE SICA NEO-REAL CRANE DOLLY), the Hamlet freight (LAERTES). Vocabulary as violation — the book's one place where having words done to you is named as rape, inflicted by the novel's great word-hoarder on its least lexical hero. The flood accelerates until the final terms run together with no spaces, and the list even swallows its own narration's words (EXTRUDING, STRIGIL, LEXICAL) — all preserved exactly as printed.