Gately's dream M.D. temptation (p. 885)
Gately wants to tell Ferocious Francis how he’s discovered how no one second of even unnarcotized post-trauma-infection-pain is unendurable. That he can Abide if he must. He wants to share his experience with his Crocodile sponsor. And plus, now that somebody he trusts himself to need is here, Gately wants to weep about the pain and tell how bad the pain of it is, how he doesn’t think he can stand it one more second.
Context
Inside Gately's fever-dream on the Trauma Ward: Ferocious Francis at the bedside (the visit dissolves on waking — chair back at the wall), and Gately, intubated and unable to speak, wanting two contradictory things at once — to report that the Abiding doctrine holds even at unnarcotized gunshot-pain intensity, and to weep that he can't stand one more second. Doctrine and refutation in a single paragraph. (Dreams and memory-forgetting own this scene's machinery — binding exclusion; only the Abiding passages are captured here.)