IJ study archive

Scene 104: gately joelle veil uhid

Scene
104
Pages
531–538
When
0450h, Wed 11 Nov YDAU (2009)
Where
front office, Ennet House D.A.R.H., Enfield MA — Gately on overnight desk, early snow falling outsidein: Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital complex › Ennet House Drug & Alcohol Recovery House
POV
pure dialogue, no narration — Gately and Joelle's voices alternating (silences rendered as '…')

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 10)

Summary

A pre-dawn, all-dialogue duet: Joelle, three days into Ennet House, has wandered into the front office where Gately is finishing the overnight Log before his janitorial day-job, and over early snow they trade pasts. Gately tells the worst thing he's seen drunk — a Lowell bar buddy shot in the back of the head by a humiliated local, then walked in circles by his blotto crew until he died — and Joelle answers with a Kentucky chainsaw amputation her Daddy tourniqueted. He asks about the veil; she lays out the entire U.H.I.D. doctrine of "hiding openly" — the donning ceremony, shame about the urge to hide, hiding your hiding — while diagnosing, with surgical accuracy, Gately's own buried shame at thinking himself unbright. The session becomes a fencing match of mutual exposure: Gately, in Staff mode, presses her to just say a straight No to "what's behind the veil"; she refuses sideways, finally declaring "I am so beautiful I am deformed... I am deformed with beauty" — which he takes for sarcasm. It ends in his mock Meds-Log grumbling and her quiet, disarming "What position did you play?"

What to notice

Pure dialogue, no narration, silences rendered as rows of ellipses — and the ellipses are where the scene actually happens: two damaged people testing each other at 0450h with the House asleep around them. The form is AA's own — identify-don't-compare storytelling as courtship, his Lowell shooting answered by her Kentucky chainsaw — but watch the fencing underneath: she diagnoses his buried shame at thinking himself unbright with surgical accuracy, he counters in flat Staff mode demanding she practice a straight No, and each is using their idiom (her brilliant evasive rhetoric, his single-entendre bluntness) as a veil. The scene's central irony is that her one moment of literal truth is unhearable: "I am so beautiful I am deformed" arrives sounding like sarcasm, and Gately files it as evasion — the veil question left deliberately double at the exact moment it is answered. Notice her radio career explained in one breath (the prayed-for darkness that reduces you to "a voice among other voices"), and the U.H.I.D. kernel — "you hide your hiding" — which quietly indicts half the novel's cast. And the last line, "What position did you play?", is the scene's real event: disarmament, the first move of the book's most important late intimacy.

Beats — page-by-page
  • pp. 531-532: Gately's Lowell story — the crew dope-slaps a local whose girl they poach for strip-darts; "you never... mess with a local guy with a girl and make him look small... and then stay there"; the man returns "packing" a .25 and shoots "our boy" through the back of the head.
  • pp. 532-533: serious bleeding "comes with the pulse"; Joelle matches him — the chainsaw hand back of the Cumberland, her Daddy's belt and life-saving drive; the drunk crew walks the dying man in circles "like some kind of O.D." till he's "dead as a stick"; "His name was Chuck or Chick."
  • p. 533: the snow — "This is the best window"; McDade's supper joke about the Juvenile counselor with each leg shorter than the other, "an AA point, that it defied sense... you just had to accept it on faith"; Lenz ("that creepy Randy guy with the white wig") backing him up deadpan.
  • p. 534: Gately pivots — "tell me about this veil... if we're talking about defied sense"; "Bridal thing... Aspiring Muslim"; the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed; the donning ceremony: the veil as "a Type and a Symbol," worn a day at a time, "That no mortal eye will see it withdrawn... they wish to hide from all sight."
  • pp. 534-535: Gately's honest objection (why join a fellowship just to hide, when AA-type fellowship lets you "step out of the cage and quit hiding"); Joelle's wine-tasting-party phenomenology of the stare, the prayed-for "liberating equalizing darkness" that reduces you to "a voice among other voices" (her radio career in one clause).
  • pp. 535-536: Gately: "Your voice gets different when you talk about this shit."; then "you hide your hiding"; U.H.I.D.'s First Step = powerlessness over the need to hide; "U.H.I.D. supports us in our decision to hide openly".
  • p. 536: the "you're not not bright" exchange; U.H.I.D. vs. AA on shame — "the cycle becomes annular and insidious" when you're ashamed of being ashamed; Gately's football/flunking-English confession; her baton-twirling camps.
  • pp. 536-537: news that Ken E. "like to get killed" at the Waltham NA meeting — called "last night" though the Waltham NA thing was Mon 9 Nov and this is 0450h Wed 11 Nov; Gately snaps into Staff mode — three numbered points, naming her "coming out sideways" about the deformity question; her counter-diagnosis: behind his House-Staff mask his "own sense of inadequacy gets either buried or used as a backlight to illuminate my own inability to be open"; "The best defense is a good offense isn't it Mr. Football Player."
  • pp. 537-538: he begs her to practice a straight-out "No"; instead: "Don, I'm perfect... Once they've seen me they can't think of anything else... I am so beautiful I am deformed"; his Staff-face sarcasm and imaginary Meds-Log entry; her closing "What position did you play?"

Themes in this scene

  • Disability and Deformity: the fullest statement of U.H.I.D. doctrine in the novel — veil as sacrament of open hiding — delivered by its star member, with the central ambiguity (acid-scarred or lethally perfect?) left deliberately double.
  • Addiction and Recovery: the scene runs on AA forms — Identify-don't-compare storytelling, Staff/resident roles, Steps, the leg-joke's "accept what defies sense" — while showing a second, parallel 12-step program grafted onto shame instead of Substances.
  • Communication and Solipsism: two damaged people half-connecting at 0450h; Joelle's register-shifts ("you drift in and out of different ways of talking") as her own veil; rows of '…' where the real content lives.
  • Irony and Sincerity: Gately's flat-footed single-entendre questions ("Use less words") repeatedly puncture Joelle's brilliant evasive rhetoric; her literal truth ("I am deformed with beauty") is unhearable because it sounds like sarcasm.
  • Annularity: Joelle names the shame-about-shame cycle "annular and insidious" (p. 536); even Gately's bar story climaxes with the dying man walked in circles.
  • Entertainment and the Self: her "perfect... they can't think of anything else and don't want to look at anything else" speech is a literal description of the Entertainment's effect on viewers — she is describing being its star (cf. scene 107's veiled-woman opening shot).

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • "Ken E. like to get killed... at that Waltham NA thing" = the Roy Tony forced-hug scene (scene 100, pp. 503-507), reported two mornings later via Kate Gompert (Gately's "last night" is the printed slip the Beats note documents).
  • Joelle entered Ennet House 8 Nov YDAU (n.134 ruling); "after like three days here" (p. 536) is consistent.
  • Gately's "step out of the cage" précis of AA echoes the cage/Bottom material of the White Flag chapter (pp. 347ff, scene 074) and Marathe/Steeply's cage talk (scene 096).
  • Her "voice among other voices" wish is the exact aesthetic of Madame Psychosis on WYYY (scene 053, pp. 181-193; cf. scene 093); the radio show was U.H.I.D. philosophy as format.
  • The leg-joke's faith-over-sense point restates the novel's recurring AA epistemology (the gratitude/cliché material, scene 066, pp. 270-281; cf. 092) — irony as the disease, blind acceptance as cure.
  • Flag as written: Joelle's "six summers running" at baton camp (p. 536) vs. scene 068's narration that she "declined a sixth summer at the Dixie Baton-Twirling Institute" (p. 297) — either Joelle inflates her own count to Gately or the figures are an authorial slip; both cited as written.

Forward

  • Same calendar day as scene 112's "selected snippets" (evening of Wed 11 Nov) — this is the morning end of Gately's double shift; "my other fucking job" = mopping for the "shoe-freak" Stavros Lobokulas (pp. 434-436).
  • "I am so beautiful I am deformed" reprises the P.G.O.A.T. mythology (Orin/Molly Notkin threads) and is re-litigated in Notkin's account to the U.S.O.U.S. interviewers (pp. 787-795, scene 159) — acid attack vs. lethal beauty stays undecidable.
  • The growing Gately-Joelle intimacy seeded here flowers in the hospital scenes (pp. 809, scene 161ff, 855ff) — her visits to the wounded, mute Gately invert this scene's talk-roles.

Notable passages (6)
  • p. 532: "your serious bleeding comes with the pulse, if you didn't know. It like shoots out and dies down and shoots out" — Gately's deadpan violence-connoisseurship; prefigures his own gunshot wound (pp. 608ff).
  • p. 534: "they are choosing freely to be bound to wear it always—a day at a time... That they hereby declare openly that they wish to hide from all sight" — the U.H.I.D. donning rite verbatim; anchor passage for disability-deformity.
  • p. 535: "you pray for a power failure and for this kind of utter liberating equalizing darkness to descend so you can be reduced to nothing but a voice among other voices" — Joelle's whole radio persona explained in one breath.
  • p. 535: "In other words you hide your hiding... U.H.I.D. supports us in our decision to hide openly" — the doctrine's kernel.
  • p. 536: "the cycle becomes annular and insidious" — the book's master-word applied to shame psychology.
  • p. 538: "Don, I'm perfect... I am so beautiful I am deformed... I am deformed with beauty." — the central Joelle ambiguity, and a gloss on the Entertainment; essential anthology passage.

What links here Timeline events here (15) · Connected from (11) · Passages quoted here (40) · Motifs (2)

Timeline events here

Connected from

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Motifs