Gately, the wraith, and the figurants (xii)
Gately can hear the horns and raised voices and U-turn squeals way down below on Wash. that indicate it’s around 0000h., the switching hour. He wonders what something as brief as a car-horn-honk sounds like to a figurant that has to sit still for three weeks to be seen. Wraith, not figurant, Gately meant, he corrects himself. […] He wonders if his brain-voice talks fast enough for the wraith not to have to like tap its foot and look at its watch between words. Are they words if they’re only in your head, though?
Context
Midnight told by Washington St.'s parking-switch symphony (the bedridden man's only clock is the city's noise), and then Gately does the cross-scale arithmetic himself: what does one second of car horn sound like at wraith-speed? His slip — figurant for wraith — quietly fuses the scene's two doctrines: the person too peripheral to be heard and the being too fast to be seen are the same condition on different clocks.