IJ study archive

Scene 092: gately higher power bob death

Scene
92
Pages
442–449
When
YDAU (2009): the Braintree Commitment and that night's dream 'this past July' (Gately ~10 months clean); the surfacing memories May–June YDAU; childhood flashbacks B.S. (Gately ~9-11, then 17); narrated from later in YDAU (dateline 'YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT', p. 442)
Where
Tough Shit But You Still Can't Drink Group, Braintree church basement; Ferocious Francis's car up Rte. 3; memory: Salem beach-cottage and Beverly MA tract house, North Shore; the Long-Term Medicaid place, Point Shirleyin: Other AA/NA meetings · Boston North Shore (Beverly/Salem/Danvers) (also)
POV
Gately (3rd person, free-indirect)

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 10)

Summary

At a July Commitment to Braintree's biker-heavy Tough Shit But You Still Can't Drink Group, Gately publicly confesses that at ten months clean he still has no understanding whatsoever of a Higher Power: all he's got is the rote knees-at-dawn Please and knees-at-night Thank You, a rat's one route to the cheese, and when he tries to pray past it he feels "not nothing but Nothing." The crowd, as always, falls all over itself thanking him — and a huge young biker, lapel reading BOB DEATH, leans off his idling hawg and tells him the parable of the old fish who asks "Morning, boys, how's the water?" Riding home wanting to both cry and hit somebody, Gately gives the scene over to sobriety's omitted clause: it gets better through pain, and at eight-plus months the anesthetic gone, he has begun helplessly reexperiencing what he was never emotionally present for the first time — his alcoholic mother's vodka-with-vegetables, the M.P.'s methodically hidden beatings, his own eleven-year-old routine of finishing her Stolichnaya and leaving the wake-up swallow that kept the supply coming. The remembering runs through her cirrhotic hemorrhage in his seventeenth year, the decade he couldn't visit her, and his childhood alter ego Sir Osis of Thuliver, and ends with that night's dream: Gately set under a sea, "the water all around him silent and dim and the same temperature he is."

What to notice

The scene's structure answers Gately's complaint before he can hear it: he describes prayers "radiating out into like space" and "never hitting Anything out there, much less Something with an ear" — and says it into a basement full of ears, strangers who whistle and pump his hand and beg him to Keep Coming; the confession he can make only from a podium (never to Ferocious Francis "man to man") is prayer that gets answered, the Higher Power he can't feel already operating as a smoke-blue roomful of bikers. Notice the memory movement's form: between the long braided paragraphs sit orphaned one-and-two-line fragments — the unexplainable doilies, "For a while in Beverly they had Nimitz the kitty." — the prose enacting the way sober memory "dribbles up" in pieces too small to narrate. The household kept two alcohol ledgers, and they mirror each other: the M.P. logging each Heineken "carefully in a little spiral notebook", and eleven-year-old Don running supply-chain arithmetic on the Stolichnaya, the wake-up swallow left not from kindness but to keep the nightly bottle coming — the abuser's moderation apparatus and the child's enabling bookkeeping, twin parodies of the daily accounting Gately's sobriety now runs on. And the closing dream sharpens Bob Death's koan by one degree: the sea Gately is set under is "the same temperature he is" — which is exactly why water goes unfelt, and maybe why prayer feels like Nothing: a medium precisely your own temperature registers as absence rather than embrace.

Beats — page-by-page
  • pp. 442-443: the podium confession — AA's sales-point freedom to "choose your own God" has left him clueless; he half-wishes the Crocodiles would just grab his lapels and issue dogma; envies even the Stern-and-Punishing-God upbringings; his whole understanding after ten months: hit the knees A.M. for Help, P.M. for Thank You, "whether he believes he's talking to Anything/-body or not," and the day comes out clean.
  • p. 443: the metaphors of his shame — the rat's one route to the cheese, the hitter who won't change his jock mid-streak; beyond the rote stuff, "Nothing — not nothing but Nothing," prayers "radiating out into like space... never hitting Anything out there, much less Something with an ear"; he tells a hard-ass smoke-blue basement what he could never tell Ferocious Francis man to man, and can't look at F.F.'s row while saying the God-stuff makes him want to puke, from fear.
  • p. 444: the recurring paradox — every public confession of fucking up brings whistles, pumped hands, and Keep Coming, "for them if not for himself, whatever the fuck that means"; the TSBYSCD demographics (murals of tattoos, spade-knife belt buckles); Gately can't imagine the point of being a sober biker — "polishing the hell out of their leather and like playing a lot of really precise pool."
  • pp. 444-445: Robert F. / BOB DEATH brings his car-length chopper alongside — a biker using the words share and heart and component; jailhouse tatt of AA's circle-and-triangle; Glenn K.'s blind-man-at-the-fish-stall joke as comic interference ("Evening, Ladies"); then, in a bar-shout over the idling hawg, the parable: the whiskery old fish's "Morning, boys, how's the water?" and the three young fish: "What the fuck is water?" — an affable shrug, and he blatts away.
  • pp. 445-446: the ride home up Rte. 3, Gately's forehead "wrinkled in emotional pain," wanting to both cry and hit somebody; Glenn K.'s Hennessey joke shut down by Dicky N. ("ladies present"); Ferocious Francis watching him in the rearview, toothpick migrating; F.F.'s oxygen tank and taped nasal tube — "not his personal will but... he'd submitted to advice and now here he was, still sucking air and staying rabidly Active."
  • p. 446: what they omit when you Come In "ready to eliminate your map": that it gets better through pain, not around it; sober pain at least "has a purpose"; at six-eight months the anesthetic's reason reasserts itself — 'Getting In Touch With Your Feelings' as quilted-sampler cliché "masking something ghastly deep and real" (n.178: the senior White Flag emendation — "Don't worry about getting in touch with your feelings, they'll get in touch with you"); "the vapider the AA cliché, the sharper the canines of the real truth it covers."
  • pp. 446-447: near the end of his residency the remembering starts — undramatic shit first: pretending to watch TV at eleven while monitoring his mother's slide toward unconsciousness and the Stolichnaya level; her maiden name Gately; the Estonian father who broke her jaw and left before Don's birth; the M.P., a former brig guard, whose 8-to-10-Heineken beatings landed "in the vicinities between groin and breast so that nothing showed," timed between "her arms' little waves... as if she were beating out flames," his face wearing "a look of great concentration, as if he were taking something delicate apart or putting it together"; surfaced out of the psychic blue while readying to mow the Ennet lawn in May YDAU.
  • pp. 447-448: the inventory of Touch-able memory — Donad/Donold scratched in the chair legs (correct spelling higher up); the M.P.'s spiral-notebook beer log; the couch routine: after she went under he'd drink her vodka (first cut with Diet Coke, then straight) and always leave the wake-up swallow — now understood as supply-maintenance, not just filial kindness; the plastic-wrapped furniture, the doily question, Nimitz the kitty.
  • p. 448: Bimmy/Bim — the neighborhood acronym for 'Big Indestructible Moron' she never decoded; drunk and unconscious she'd call him "her Doshka and good sir knight and last and only love, and ask him not to hit her anymore."
  • pp. 448-449: June's memories — red-painted pocked steps, the 'US MAIL' box he read as us; the untold fact of cirrhosis: the choking, the shunted blood "in a high-pressure jet" he mistook for a stabbing when he came in from football at seventeen; her Meetings-couch-weeping cycle (n.179: he never heard the word AA, just 'Meetings' and a Diagnosis "construed as chivalric"); the swelling, the "deep yellow of quality squash"; ten-plus years of not facing the Long-Term place at Point Shirley; Sir Osis of Thuliver, "most fearsomely loyal and fierce of Arthur's vessels" — whose Clopaclopaclop he hears again now, mopping the Shattuck.
  • p. 449: that night's dream after the Braintree/Bob Death Commitment: set "under a sort of sea, at terrific depths, the water all around him silent and dim and the same temperature he is."

Themes in this scene

  • Addiction and Recovery: the 3rd Step impasse rendered with total honesty — mechanical compliance that works without comprehension; the through-pain doctrine; the disease's inheritance (her Stolichnaya, his first drinks stolen from it, her own failed Meetings); the Crocodile model of submitted will (F.F.'s oxygen tank).
  • Irony and Sincerity: the scene states the AA sections' thesis outright — "the vapider the AA cliché, the sharper the canines of the real truth it covers"; bikers saying share and heart; Gately mortified by earnestness that nonetheless visibly works on him.
  • Communication and Solipsism: the water parable — the medium invisible to its swimmer; Gately able to confess to a hundred strangers what he can't say to his sponsor's face; prayers imagined dying unheard in empty space, "much less Something with an ear."
  • Fathers and Sons: the never-met Bulat, a name on a taped-together scrap; the M.P. as anti-father whose teaching is concealment of damage; Ferocious Francis in the rearview as the slowly accepted found father.
  • Dreams: Bob Death's water parable is answered overnight in dream-form — Gately set "under a sort of sea, at terrific depths, the water all around him silent and dim and the same temperature he is" (p. 449); the koan he couldn't process awake gets metabolized asleep, seeding the book's closing image of Gately on the freezing beach.
  • Memory and Forgetting: sobriety strips the anesthetic and the past arrives unbidden — at eight-plus months Gately begins helplessly reexperiencing what he was never emotionally present for the first time (the Stolichnaya arithmetic, the M.P.'s hidden beatings, the hemorrhage, pp. 446-449); in June he "Got In Touch with memories" as a literal, involuntary event, recall surfacing out of the psychic blue over a lawnmower.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • Companion to the White Flag meeting (pp. 343-367, scene 074): same speaker-circuit world, Identification-not-comparison, Glenn K. and Ferocious Francis carried over; this scene supplies the private cost (the pain doctrine) behind 074's public mechanics.
  • Answers scene 088 across twelve pages: Marathe's "How am I able to think past this soup to the future of soup down my road?" — AA's knees-and-clichés machinery is the working American technology of delayed gratification, built on surrender rather than Steeply's "enlightened self-interest"; and Bob Death's water parable answers Steeply's "teach how to be free" with the prior problem of seeing the medium at all.
  • "Ready to eliminate your map" (p. 446) — the idiom shared with Clipperton's "eradicates his map" (p. 433, scene 089) and the Eschaton debate (scene 073).
  • The Shattuck mopping frame links back to scene 090 (pp. 434-436).

Forward

  • The undersea dream (p. 449) seeds Gately's whole late-book water-architecture: the fever/wraith hospital sequences and the novel's final image — Gately coming to "flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand... and the tide was way out" (p. 981, scene 185); the parable internalized overnight as a dream of being in the water at its own temperature.
  • Mrs. Waite (p. 449) recurs in Gately's hospital-bed memories (pp. 846-864, scene 164, 166); the Salem/Beverly childhood recurs in the late hospital-bed memory sections (the Fackelmann-era material, pp. 902-981 territory).
  • His unvisited yellow mother in Long-Term Care prefigures Gately's own helpless hospital muteness (pp. 809, scene 161ff) — each Gately confined and unvisitable in turn; his refusal of narcotics there is this scene's inheritance-fear made action.
  • Sir Osis the loyal knight (n.179's "construed as chivalric") anticipates the knightly cast Gately takes on for Joelle and the House (the heroic stand of pp. 601-619, scene 120) — the child's chivalric mishearing as accidental self-prophecy.

Notable passages (7)
  • p. 443: "not nothing but Nothing... going, going, radiating out into like space... much less Something with an ear that could possibly give a rat's ass" — anti-prayer cosmology; the spiritual version of anhedonic blankness.
  • p. 445: "'Morning, boys, how's the water?'... 'What the fuck is water?'" — the book's most famous parable (later the kernel of Wallace's Kenyon address); must-quote.
  • p. 446: "the vapider the AA cliché, the sharper the canines of the real truth it covers" — thesis line for the AA sections; irony-sincerity anchor.
  • p. 446: "the way it gets better and you get better is through pain. Not around pain, or in spite of it." — the omitted clause of recovery.
  • pp. 446-447: the M.P.'s timed blows between "her arms' little waves... as if she were beating out flames" — trauma rendered as choreography; source-image for Gately's lifelong relationship to violence.
  • p. 448: "her Doshka and good sir knight and last and only love, and ask him not to hit her anymore" — the memory block's devastating close.
  • p. 449: "under a sort of sea, at terrific depths, the water all around him silent and dim and the same temperature he is" — the dream; water-as-medium accepted.

What links here Timeline events here (12) · Echoes (1) · Connected from (8) · Passages quoted here (46) · Motifs (5)

Timeline events here

Echoes

Connected from

Passages quoted here

Motifs