Scene 016: gately duplessis burglary

• p. 55: Thesis on drug addicts and burglary; Gately introduced — age, addiction (n.12 grades Demerol/Talwin on O.N.A.N.D.E.A.'s post-YTMP schedule), square head, professional gifts, "ferocious jolliness."
• pp. 55-56: The A.D.A. revenge: 92 unjust days in Revere Holding and an impromptu cell-floor detox; the patient Get-Even job in Wonderland Valley; alarm rigged to look bungled (n.14: the A.D.A.'s Stetson-touching trademark; n.15: A.T.F. then under Unspecified Services' aegis).
• p. 56: The envelope: ADA dental-hygiene brochure plus the two toothbrush Polaroids; Gately never works the North Shore again.
• pp. 56-57: The Brookline house "looking like tit on a tray" (p. 56) — "a real cock-tease of a home, burglary-wise" (p. 57); Gately and associate (n.16: Kite again, confirmed by "Québecois-insurgents-and-cartridge-related subsequent developments"; n.13 adds that the associate was masked in the evidentiary photo and never once given up or named by Gately) break in; the sick homeowner wakes (n.17: his NyQuil is the codeineless kind — first thing the narcotics-man notices).
• p. 57: Gately's "way stickier conscience about the possession of some of these large particular facts" — people identical in root domestic particulars (wall-safes behind sea/landscapes, good silver under the Xmas wrap) — than about taking their merchandise; the burglar as unwilling intimate.
• pp. 57-58: The fatal pivot: a laughable wall-safe plus an addict "firmly in the need part of the schedule" turns burglary into robbery; the man bound with appliance cords (incl. the M. Café-brand Automatic Café-au-Lait-Maker's — the very machine Kite is later caught pawning, pp. 721-722/n.300); his Québecois French means nothing to Gately — he gives up the safe combination and hidden gold coins, unintelligibly; the dish-towel gag goes in over his protests about his blocked nose ("my nose she is a brick of the snot," p. 58) (n.18: among the haul, a stack of upscale arty film cartridges the associate drools over — cartridges that matter later).
• pp. 58-59: The house stripped "bare as a post-feral-hamster meadow"; the victim revealed as the anti-O.N.A.N. movement's Boston liaison and leash-holder of the mutually antagonistic Separatist/Albertan cells (n.19: 'P.I.T.' = 'Une Personne de l'Importance Terrible,' presumably; n.20: fluorescence is banned in Québec — hence the selflessness of his posting under cold fluorescent U.S. lights).
• p. 59: The hour of suffocation: torn intercostal ligaments, the doorbell-hope dashed by the tanning-coupon woman, the rueful grin "with which the best men meet the dumbest ends"; Guillaume DuPlessis "passed bluely from this life"; two days of rigor before Brookline's Finest carry him out still seated.
• pp. 59-60: The noose: Gately's straight-shunt signature plus the remorseless A.D.A. (whose wife now needs Valium to floss) patiently waiting — Gately in the kind of trouble that can turn a life around.

Backward

• First-appearance hook to the YG frame: Hal's p. 17 vision has him digging up his father's head with Donald Gately (scene 003) — the book's two protagonists are already paired before Gately's entrance here.
• The toothbrush-Polaroid revenge reads as adapted urban legend (Carlisle's observation) (one of at least three in the novel); DuPlessis's home is neo-Georgian like Rickey's E.T.A. buildings (p. 51/n.3) — victim's house rhyming with the Academy; DuPlessis's unheard pleas pair with Hal's Ch. 1 "unheard" speech (scene 001) — full articulacy, zero reception, at both poles of the book.

Forward

• The accidental killing of DuPlessis is the novel's plot-trigger: it decapitates the coordinated Separatist cells, freeing the A.F.R. to pursue the Entertainment unilaterally; Marathe and Steeply discuss exactly this death — "An inept burglary and grippe indeed" — on p. 94 (scene 031).
• n.18's "arty-looking film cartridges": the read-only copy of the Entertainment circulating in YDAU plausibly passes through this burglary (DuPlessis's effects); the Antitoi brothers' shop and the A.F.R.'s hunt trace back here.
• The vengeful A.D.A. is paying attention: the warrant pressure from this scene hangs over Gately's whole Ennet House sobriety (the Demerol refusals from p. 814; the Pakistani M.D. temptation at scene 169, pp. 885-889). Gately's actual shooting (p. 613, in the pp. 601-619 brawl) is unconnected vengeance — the shooters are Nucks "the trio Lenz has managed to somehow enrage," and the scene's only DuPlessis note is Gately's own private remembering (p. 610).
• "Bare as a post-feral-hamster meadow" (p. 58) is paid off 35 pages later by the feral-hamster interpolation (p. 93, scene 030).
• Trent Kite returns in the Gately/Fackelmann Beverly-MA flashback material (pp. 902, scene 171+, chunks 22-23) — and he is the A.F.R.'s fatally-interviewed "young burglar," caught pawning the café-au-lait maker from THIS burglary (pp. 721-722, scene 145, n.300; n.363 confirms the A.F.R. "got through with him"), dead ~early Nov YDAU; the appliance-cord beat above is the plant.
• The A.D.A. thread resolves in scene 182 (pp. 960-964): he is the toothbrush-revenge A.D.A. of the Phob-Comp-Anon Ninth Step — wife "Tooty," dental-hygiene phobia, and the revelation that Gately's prosecution was secretly abandoned (n.14's Stetson trademark is the recognition token).
• Gately's cell-floor detox and Get-Even patience prefigure both his withdrawal terrors and the Ennet House ethic of taking no shit while bowing to no man.

• p. 55: "Don Gately was a twenty-seven-year-old oral narcotics addict..." — the protagonist's entrance, comic-epic register.
• p. 56: "tit on a tray, burglary-wise" — the narrator absorbing Gately's idiom (free indirect style the book will use for him for 500+ pages).
• p. 57: "like he was in possession of certain overlarge private facts to which no man should be entitled" — Gately's conscience; keynote for his whole moral arc.
• pp. 57-58: "God's made no better call-for-help-stifling gag in the world than a good old oily-smelling fake-linen dish towel" — the narrator's terrible cheer at the murder weapon.
• p. 58: "Do not gag me, I have a terrible cold, my nose she is a brick of the snot" — DuPlessis's plea; the comedy/horror fulcrum of the death.
• p. 59: "what a truly dumb and silly way this was, after all this time, to die" — DuPlessis's dying thought; the rueful-grin sentence is one of the book's great deaths.
• pp. 59-60: "the sort of a hell of a deep-shit mess that can turn a man's life right around." — double-edged: doom and salvation in one phrase; Gately's whole arc in miniature.