Gately, the wraith, and the figurants (ix)
What Gately remembers, in pain, bubbling just under the lid of sleep, is the special and precise way the M.P. would handle the flies that came into the kitchen. He used no swatter or rolled cone of Herald. He had fast hands, the M.P., thick and white and fast. He’d whack them as they lit on the kitchen table. The flies. But in a controlled way. Not hard enough to kill them. […] The memory is unbidden and very clear.
Context
The fly-maiming ritual surfacing between wraith-visits — and the scene's (and the theme's) formula for sober memory in five words: "unbidden and very clear." No longer summonable or dismissible; just delivered. The M.P.'s cruelty-as-control also templates Randy Lenz.