Scene 166: joelle visits gately abiding

• pp. 854-855: waking from the Death-dream's effulgent face into the Trauma Wing ceiling; the nondream Joelle in a lavender-selvaged veil and brocaded hulpil, cool cloth, two brownies, bitten nails "just like Gately's"; peaches-and-cotton, discount Canadian gaspers, a bit of perfume [n.347]; "And Lo" several times; Gately's chest-pumping amusement-dumbshow; his self-consciousness at being tended by "an underground local intellectual-dash-art-type celebrity" — feeling "more there-feeling."
• p. 855: the POV slips to Joelle: Gately "has no idea how heroic or even romantic he looks, unshaven and intubated... refusing narcotics"; the last man she let herself admire (Orin) "left and wouldn't even face up to why," erecting the jealous fantasy about his own father, whose interest in her "had been first aesthetic and then anti-aesthetic"; the narrator's corrective — newly sober people romanticize anyone with more sober time, who are really "clueless and terrified and just muddling through... (except maybe the fucking Crocodiles)."
• pp. 855-856: House news (the new resident Dave's limbo-injury posture, Johnette feeding him like a bird with a chick — Joelle's veil conforming to her chick-imitation); she sits on the now-empty second bed (the crying roommate gone, chart removed); Erdedy's B.U.M. sweatpants and Gately's flash of something unpleasant; the A.M. light going old-dime gray with serious wind.
• p. 856: last night's St. Columbkill's [n.348] round-robin, attended unsupervised (Johnette home minding sick Glynn and the legally quarantined Henderson and Willis); Gately racking his RAM for which night St. Collie's is — he can't date himself; Joelle "trying to give him a little bit of a meeting."
• pp. 856-857: the Kentucky newcomer Wayne — nineteen looking 40-some+, resident of a "mostly" disconnected drainage pipe in the Allston Spur, the longest blackout St. Collie's ever heard of; "the Flaw," the eyebrow-to-lip hatchet furrow from his Horrors-gripped chicken-farmer Daddy; the Daddy's death at lunch, the body under the porch in Purina sacks, schoolmates charged "a fiveski a head to crawl under the porch and eyeball a bona fried dead man"; off to the billiard establishment [n.349: sic] to "lay up drunk as a cock on jimson" — and waking a decade later in the pipe; he points Joelle up next, "As if he gut-intuited some sort of kinship, affinity of origin."
• pp. 857-858: Gately's resentment at being reminded she's only ~three weeks clean; the veil hanging smooth and featureless when her head drops — "a smooth white screen with nothing behind it"; her promise to come back after the House meeting and bring things; Gately's left-hand exploration discovers the cheek-taped tube down his throat — he'd never felt it; relief and capitalized Thank-Gods (his voice probably isn't permanently damaged); the imagined convention-podium laugh.
• p. 858: her thumb-flexing recitation: sharing her "But For the Grace of God" complaint, Gately-style ("a page from your manual"), got laughs — he was right; "One Day at a Time" and "Keep It in the Day" have stopped being trite clichés; Pat's counsel — build a wall around each 24 hours, don't count, don't add; Gately notices her stiff intellectualish Recovery-talk register, "her way of still keeping it all at arm's length" (his own early way "had involved an actual arm"); "I 'based, you know. You knew that. You all see the Intake forms."
• pp. 858-859: the Evel Knievel figure — Gately's own Life-magazine cutout of Knievel aloft over waxed trucks; Joelle's white-knuckle history: NEVER AGAIN vows, counting days, "each day was a car Knievel had to clear... hundreds and hundreds of cars, me in the air trying to clear them. ... Who could do it?"
• p. 859: Gately's detox catalog (broke in Malden, pleurisy in Salem, MCI/Billerica lockdown) and the centerpiece: 92 days in a Revere Holding cage, Kicking the Bird — building a wall around each second, the first two weeks telescoped to "less: the space between two heartbeats... An endless Now stretching its gull-wings out on either side of his heartbeat. And he'd never before or since felt so excruciatingly alive."
• pp. 859-860: but the inter-beat Present vanished with the chills — "he... ceased to Abide because he no longer had to"; Ferocious Francis's nearly dead sponsor Sarge: "It's a gift, the Now: it's AA's real gift: it's no accident they call it The Present."; Joelle's breakthrough said straight to him: "I can do this for one endless day. I can. Don."
• p. 860: Gately's prickly-chill realization — the dextral pain can be Abided the same way ("Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering."); the projected fears (the A.D.A. in the hat, Nuckslaughter conviction, M.C.I. Walpole) are not-now, not real; "everything unendurable was in the head" — which can be treated "like G. Day or R. Lenz: clueless noise"; the resolve to mount the Knievel picture for her.
• pp. 860-862: the photo album — her "own personal Daddy" squinting before the porch rail (Gately drawn to the photographer's shadow canted into the shot); the pointer "that got hit by the UPS truck" (her Daddy never names dogs); the farm her late mother's Daddy left them, the low-pH jick-jacking; Mr. Man the bull, Chet the fence-jumping mule and Chet's Mama ("Next life's Chet's Mama," Gately's dream-residue joke to himself); the catheter-change embarrassment; sepia Uncle Lum Riney "that breathed some kind of fume at the shop... and now he'll always try and climb up on top of shit, if you let him."
• p. 862: Gately's idea — the wince-priced hand on her wrist, the big slow air-writing mime for pen and paper, his worry that he isn't left-handed, "Which is to say SINISTRAL" (the wraith's vocabulary still resident).
• pp. 862-863: the drug addict's instant mental matrimony (wooing, marriage, porch swing, 'Mother' and 'Papa' in support-hose) — and the Gately-Joelle projection "('M.P.')" foundering on a kid in "a huge blue- or pink-bordered veil", or the honeymoon unveiling of "just like one eye in the middle of her forehead or a horrific Churchill-face or something" [n.350]; the Liebestod escape fantasies (Joelle bonking the hat-man, the veil-and-muumuu switcheroo).
• pp. 863-864: shame — 13th-Stepping [n.351] as predation on newcomers ("their nervous systems still on the outside of their bodies"), "almost tantamount to rape, is the Boston consensus," plus the veiled-newcomer's mirror-and-vulnerability issues, plus dicking over Pat and Ennet House; the closing audit: his vividest Joelle-fantasies coincide with flight-from-responsibility fantasies — "somebody else to take care of his mess, somebody else to keep him out of his various cages. It's the same delusion as the basic addictive-Substance-delusion, basically."; his eyes roll up in disgust, "and stay there."

Backward

• Direct continuation of scene 164: the dream's last word "Wait" is answered by the real Joelle bending over him; the Churchill-face and Death-mother images persist into his fantasies (p. 863, "Next life's Chet's Mama" p. 862).
• The parenthetical "('M.P.')" (p. 863) is a loaded triple pun: Madame Psychosis — but also the abusive M.P. of Gately's childhood (scene 162) and Pemulis's drug 'Madame Psychosis'/DMZ; Gately's love-object carries his abuser's initials.
• Joelle's account of Orin (p. 855) — left without facing why, the "pathetic jealous fantasy about Joelle and his own poor father," JOI's aesthetic-then-anti-aesthetic interest — is her own one-paragraph version of the triangle narrated in scene 159 (Notkin's account, pp. 788-795) and n.234/n.269 (see scenes/scene n234, scenes/scene n269).
• The Kentucky pipe-dweller "Wayne" — hatchet "Flaw," ten-year blackout, kinship gut-intuition — lands a third Wayne on the board (John Wayne; Bernard Wayne, n.304) and his charging-kids-to-view-a-corpse boyhood replays the Himself's-head/spectation economy in hillbilly key; his "affinity of origin" with Joelle is real (both Kentucky, both Daddy-damaged).
• The A.D.A.-in-the-hat dread (pp. 860, 863) continues from scenes 161-162; the Revere Holding 92-day Bird he now reclaims was itself the A.D.A.'s doing (p. 859) — his persecutor accidentally gave him the skill that saves him.
• Erdedy's sweatpants on Joelle (p. 855) and the brownies from Morris H. keep the Ennet House ensemble threaded (scenes 100, 161); the quarantined Henderson and Willis tie back to the Clenette/Yolanda thread (scene 120, pp. 601-619).
• Joelle's Daddy and farm photos corroborate and humanize Notkin's lurid account of Joe Lon van Dyne (scene 159); the unnamed-dogs detail ("the one that got hit by the UPS truck") quietly rhymes with S. Johnson's fate (n.269).

Forward

• Gately's Abiding doctrine here is the spine of everything that follows: the refusal of narcotics through scenes 169ff (Mt. Dilaudid temptation, the Pakistani M.D., Ferocious Francis's visit pp. 883ff), and the novel's final line-of-sight (Abide with the Bird → the closing Fackelmann flashback and the beach).
• The pen-and-paper mime (p. 862) opens the question of Gately's interface that later scenes keep deferring (the alphabet-board and note attempts, scenes 169ff); SINISTRAL in caps marks the wraith's lexical residue (scene 162, p. 832) operating in waking life.

• p. 855: "he has no idea how heroic or even romantic he looks, unshaven and intubated, huge and helpless, wounded in service to somebody who did not deserve service, half out of his tree from pain and refusing narcotics" — the double-romanticization passage; the narrator's "(except maybe the fucking Crocodiles)" deflation.
• p. 857: "a smooth white screen with nothing behind it" — the veil as blank screen; anchor passage for disability-deformity/film-optics crossover.
• p. 859: "And soon it would get… improbable. As if each day was a car Knievel had to clear." — the day-counting fallacy made image; essential extraction for addiction-recovery.
• p. 859: the Bird passage ("An endless Now stretching its gull-wings out on either side of his heartbeat. And he'd never before or since felt so excruciatingly alive.") — the book's definition of the Present; pairs with Sarge's "it's no accident they call it The Present" (p. 860).
• p. 860: "What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering." / "everything unendurable was in the head" — Abiding generalized from craving to pain to fear; the novel's practical philosophy in two sentences.
• p. 860: "I can do this for one endless day. I can. Don." — Joelle's breakthrough, sealed with his name.
• p. 864: "He's still pretty new himself: wanting somebody else to take care of his mess... It's the same delusion as the basic addictive-Substance-delusion, basically." — Gately turning the diagnostic on his own romance; the scene's moral audit.