Scene 118: gately staffer duties

• p. 593: The shift's architecture: meeting-verification vs. manning the House; hourly head-counts, the Daily Log, Chore-patrol and Restrictions ("residents need to have everything expected of them spelled out in advance so they can't bitch").
• p. 593: Meds dispensing (insulin, Virus-meds, antidepressants, lithium) and the disastrous Medical Log; printing Pat's Week-At-A-Glance in block letters because she can't read her own palsied hand; conferring with Johnette Foltz on residents' conduct at St. E.'s, B.Y.P., and the East Cambridge Women's NA.
• p. 593: Kate Gompert, too sick for AA three nights running, in bed "reading somebody called Sylvia Plate"; the women's-floor ritual — caged button, buzzer, "Male on the floor" — and the smashed delusion that women's areas are cleaner ("Gately'd done a fair amount of cleaning up after his mother, but he'd never much thought of her as a woman").
• pp. 593-594: Doony Glynn fetal with diverticulitis: Motrin, a 2% SlimFast he can't drink, Food Bank crackers, tonic; "Log Glynn's comments and condition, neither of which are good."
• p. 594: The Krispie-treat mess and the no-ratting code; the turn inward — the daily bullshit is "not so much annoying as soul-sucking; a double-shift here now empties him out by dawn, just in time to clean real shit"; the every-couple-minutes dread of the post-term future.
• p. 594: Gompert's "possible sideways comment about hurting herself" (n.245 gives it verbatim: "Will be soon." / "What's that supposed to mean?" / "Nothing. Literally nothing."); Pat unreachable; the House Manager, the Suicide Contract, the red card with 5-East at St. Elizabeth's in Pat's Rolodex; the basement hanging "a couple years before Gately arrived" behind the baroque monitoring procedures.
• p. 594: Counselor-report collation for the All-Staff Meeting (residents know their counselors "rat them out in toto"); Gately's fingers covering three keys each, pen-tip typing, blue nub-smears, the House Manager's ass-chewings.
• pp. 594-595: Touching base with newer residents "so they can't just melt into the living room's decor and disappear": the newest guy still in the linen closet; "the new 'helpless' Amy Johnson hasn't come back yet"; Intake and Orientation for brand-new Court-Ordered Ruth van Cleve, "who looks like one of those people you see in pictures of African famine," with the resident-written Ennet House Survival Guide.
• p. 595: Phone Boundary management; the undigital, unshutoffable basement pay phone — "every conversation is life-and-death; crisis down there 24/7"; the respectful, nonshaming, firm kick-off technique; the cultivated "look of weary expertise"; Gately so stoic that abuse has to invoke unnatural acts before he Logs it; respected and well-liked, "which... causes the veteran Staff some concern."
• pp. 595-596: Kitchen comedy: McDade's pushed-up-nose routine and his Gratitude List ("one of the things he's grateful for is his nose don't look like this here"); Gately's daily struggle not to hit him into his cowboy boots; the fridge check — "again saw evidence that his special meatloaf had a secret admirer... another big rectangle cut out of the leftovers."
• p. 596: The grapevine art: monitoring "the like emotional barometer," decocting legitimate infractions "out of the tides of innuendo and bullshit complaint" (the couch at 0300, the knife, the pay-phone code, the beeper, the football book, Belbin weaseling Diehl over Krispie Treats) — "Almost all of it's picayune and, over time, as it accretes, unpleasant."

Backward

• Same ~2300h as scene 117: Mario, outside Pat's window, sees the "wide square-headed boy" writing at the black desk — this scene from inside that window; the made-up female clicking up the ramp there is plausibly Ruth van Cleve arriving for Intake here (p. 595).
• Gately's pre-dawn "real shit" is the Shattuck Shelter janitorial second job (scene 090, pp. 434-436); his mother-cleaning aside connects to the Mrs. Gately/cirrhosis backstory (pp. 446-449).

Forward

• The meatloaf's "secret admirer" is Randy Lenz, who pages earlier (scene 116, pp. 586-587) fed "a slightly gnawed square of Don G.'s hard old meatloaf" to the dog he killed at 412 W. Brainerd — the cut rectangles in Gately's leftovers are the supply line of the killings, and the baggie left in the Nucks' yard points home; the blowback arrives in scene 120 (pp. 601-619), where Gately takes the bullet for it.
• Kate Gompert's thread: from the psych-ward presentation of clinical depression (scene 024, pp. 68-78) through her Ennet residence to the van Cleve outing and Marathe encounter (pp. 698ff, 774ff) — Ruth van Cleve's Intake here plants that pairing.
• "Amy Johnson" confirms the surname of the earlier "Amy J." (p. 475, scene 097 — the new 'helpless' resident with Red Dye migraines); she "hasn't come back yet" — quietly ominous.
• The cultivated stoic Staffer face and the kick-off technique pay forward into Gately's crowning test — the fight (scene 120) and the hospital sections (pp. 809ff) where doing the next right unpleasant thing becomes the whole of life; n.90's Day-Gately interface (scenes/scene n090) sits in the same duty-world.
• The basement hanging behind the ideation procedures rhymes with the heating-pipe/suicide infrastructure of the book's psych-ward material; the Suicide Contract device recurs in the It-exposition (scene 135, p. 696), where the resident's-eye view calls being "bound by a 'Suicide Contract'" "simply absurd".

• p. 593: "Residents on meds respond to the sound of the meds locker the way a cat will respond to the sound of a can-opener. They just like materialize." — House texture; the body's chemistry doing the listening.
• p. 593: "reading somebody called Sylvia Plate" — Gately's unlettered registration of the most legible suicide-warning in Western print culture; depression-anhedonia anchor.
• p. 594: "The daily bullshit here is hip-deep and not so much annoying as soul-sucking" — the scene's emotional center; Gately's service crisis.
• p. 594 (w/ n.245): " 'Will be soon.' ... 'Nothing. Literally nothing.' " — Gompert's sideways comment; "literally nothing" as anhedonia's exact content.
• p. 595: "There's a special way to kick somebody off a pay phone that's respectful and nonshaming but also firm." — recovery's micro-ethics of firmness-with-dignity.
• pp. 595-596: "his special meatloaf had a secret admirer, it looked like, another big rectangle cut out of the leftovers" — dramatic irony hinge to scenes 116/120.