IJ study archive

Scene 169: gately dream md temptation

Scene
169
Pages
883–896
When
prob. 19 Nov YDAU (2009), dawn through ~1100h+ — sleet at the window, and Diehl's sinus predicts snow 'as early as tonight' (p. 894), i.e. the eve of the 20 Nov blizzard of scenes 167/168/170; the exact day is left open
Where
St. Elizabeth's Hospital, Trauma Wing, Enfield/Brighton — Gately's room (and its dream-double)in: St. Elizabeth's Hospital (Trauma Wing)
POV
Don Gately (3rd person limited; the middle stretch is a dream rendered as waking narration until p. 890)

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Open questions this scene bears on

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 7)

Summary

Intubated, in worsening untreated gunshot pain, and fresh from the wraith visits and Joelle's bedside call, Gately receives his sponsor Ferocious Francis — and then a glossily smiling Pakistani trauma M.D. who, singing through the controlled-substance schedule (Oramorph, Dilaudid, Talwin, each name detonating memories of Fackelmann, Kite, and dead Vinnie Nucci), urges him to accept real narcotics, while Francis pointedly refuses to decide for him: "He's the one that's feeling it… Might want to Ask For Some Help, deciding." Just as Demerol — Gately's god — is about to be named, Gately's left hand shoots through the crib-railing and crushes the M.D.'s testicles, and the man's operatic scream wakes Gately: the whole confrontation was a dream, with only Joelle's folded-down bed-railing surviving as evidence anyone real was there. Awake, he fights the Demerol obsession with AA technology (Abide; don't Entertain the thought; Ask For Help) while the narration unspools his Demerol initiation and the rent-and-strip luxury-apartment scam he crewed on with Fackelmann and Kite. McDade and Diehl visit at 1100h with Ennet House news — Glynn's blissful codeine drip, their refusal to depose for him, the vanished .44 probably taken by Lenz, Lenz himself spotted relapsed in a back-split tux and sombrero — tipping Gately into a Job-type rage at a God who got him sober just to feel every bevel of the punishment; the rage evaporates only when a gorgeous nurse arrives twirling a bedpan and Fleet enema like a gunslinger, and Gately recites the Serenity Prayer while she helps him hug his knees "like they were your Sweetie."

What to notice

The temptation crisis is engineered to be airtight: real trauma, escalating untreated pain, a doctor with clinical authority and even a Muslim-abstainer's credibility, and rationalizations that are all, individually, sound — the Disease argues best when it doesn't have to lie. Notice the craft of the reveal: the whole confrontation is narrated as waking fact until the crushed-testicle scream turns out to be the alarm that wakes Gately — a dream — and the only certificate of the real is Joelle's folded-down bed-railing; the scene teaches you, mid-book-finale, how little you can trust its own narration. The sponsor's pedagogy is the ethical center: Ferocious Francis will not decide for him — "Kid's gonna do what he decides he needs to do for himself", and "Might want to Ask For Some Help, deciding" — love as the refusal to take the choice away. Notice that the Demerol reverie is written as gorgeously as anything in the novel — pain becoming "a theory", sleep "like a man of wax" — the book making you feel the pull it is asking Gately to refuse; and that the dream-fist closes on the M.D. precisely because Gately knows he is "powerless at this moment to refuse" what's about to be offered: violence as the last honest form of No. Even the Job-rage that follows speaks wraith: "what if God is really the cruel and vengeful figurant" — the dead man's vocabulary now inside Gately's theology.

Beats — page-by-page
  • pp. 883-884: post-wraith inventory — "death was just everything outside you getting really slow"; swarms of errand-running wraiths posited; sleet at the window; Gately stewing over ghostwords (SINISTRAL, LIEBESTOD, OMMATOPHORIC) he has no rights to, having never finished Ethan From.
  • p. 884: the nurse delivers a stenographic notebook and Bic — "The visitor said you'd requested this, because of the tube" — proof Joelle understood him; Ferocious Francis discovered in the visitor chair with his portable O2 tank, coughing his hello.
  • pp. 884-885: left-handed block-cap 'YO!' comes out cuneiform; F.F.'s third-hand account of the fight via Glenny Kubitz — "Big Don G.'s a Satanically tough motherfuck"; Gately aches both to share that no single second of pain is unendurable and to weep that he can't stand it.
  • pp. 885-886: the day-shift Pakistani M.D. sweeps in "radiating brisk health and painless cheer"; grade-two toxemia, synovial inflammation "compared in the medical literature to renal calculus and ectopic labor"; the campaign opens: why only Toradol, "boys doing a large man's duty"?
  • pp. 886-887: the catalogue as temptation — Oramorph ("just morphine sulfate with a fancy corporate name"); hydromorphone = Dilaudid = "Fackelmann's Mount Doom… Death on a Ritz," with the memory of skeletal Nooch Nucci, eye-whites gone bayou-blue; Gately drawing a syringe-and-skull warning that comes out a smiley-face.
  • p. 887: the M.D.'s Moslem-abstainer credential — no God "wills needless suffering"; hydrocodone, levorphanol, oxymorphone, oxycodone-naloxone (nn.355-358); Gately's mouth floods at the remembered hydrochloride taste he "had loved, came to love like a mother's warm hand"; F.F.'s podium story of throwing detox Librium over his left shoulder "for luck" (n.359).
  • pp. 887-888: Talwin named — Gately's old #2, "like floating in oil the exact same temperature as your body" (Percocet, n.360, minus the eyeball itch); the rationalization cascade — bona fide trauma, trauma-pro in a white coat, "the probable intervention of a compassionate unjudging God," maybe even a self-administer bulb.
  • pp. 888-889: Francis rises to go rather than decide for him — mistaken by the M.D. for "Mr. Gately Senior" ("a Crocodile never bothers to correct anybody's misimpression"); "Kid's gonna do what he decides he needs to do for himself… Might want to Ask For Some Help, deciding."
  • pp. 889-890: the M.D. inhales to prescribe "mep—" (Demerol) — Gately's hand fastens onto his balls, "It isn't rage or the will to harm so much as just no other ideas for keeping the bastard from offering something Gately knows that he's powerless at this moment to refuse"; the scream rises to an opera-lady high note — and wakes Gately: dream; Dilaudid-colored sky, chair back at the wall, notebook gone, but Joelle's folded-down railing real.
  • pp. 890-891: craving protocol — cravings "rise unbidden… like bubbles in a toddler's bath"; Let Them Go, don't Entertain them; the loving anatomy of the Demerol buzz anyway ("a somehow deliciously symmetrical buzz… you sleep like a man of wax"), pain becoming "a theory."
  • p. 891: Asking For Help via memory-flooding — lobster traps with Gary Carty, the M.P.'s bumper stickers, the fish asking what's water, the veiled girl's veil — and, treacherously, the dead-eyed Demerol-selling nurse Egede/Egette of Ipswich who needed cigarette burns to come; the huge Black nurse calls him 'Baby' and he mimes his colon emergency.
  • pp. 891-892: Demerol etiology — Percocet's intra-ocular itch forces the move at 23; Pebbles and Bam-Bams; first dose in the JFK Library lot off Route 93; "a faithful attendant at the goddess Demerol's temple, right to the very finish."
  • pp. 892-893: the Fackelmann/Kite rent-and-strip scam — fake identities, luxury apartment, rented appliances fenced, camping in the shell until the second Overdue Notice; Gately the presentable front man in borrowed Yuppiewear (Kite gets his own endnote, n.363, when scene 171 introduces him); Fackelmann's gag with girls at the stripped apt.: "We been fuckin robbed!"
  • p. 893: the crewmates' rap on Gately — stand-up and jolly off the nod, but narcotized he became taciturn, interior, "Other-Directed" (Pamela Hoffman-Jeep's term); "like Gately shot cement instead of narcotics."
  • pp. 893-894: McDade and Diehl at 1100h — Glynn's Levsin-codeine drip (n.361) and possible compound-for-life ("a very happy camper indeed"); their P.D./P.O. say deposing for Gately = "judicio-penal suicide"; the .44 Item vanished, Lenz probably "promoted" it; Lenz sighted relapsed, "drunk as a maroon," hurricane-walking parking meter to parking meter in a back-split tux and sombrero w/ balls; the agoraphobics coming to E.M.P.H.H. Unit #3 and McDade/Minty's cruel engraved-invitation prank; nobody thinks to tell Gately what day it is; the shoplifted unsigned Get Well card.
  • pp. 894-895: the resentment breaks — se offendendo unwitnessed, pain climbing, "what if God is really the cruel and vengeful figurant Boston AA swears up and down He isn't"; "The resentment, fear and self-pity are almost narcotizing"; pulse-line like the Rockies; the residents melt out "with the vague alacrity of seasoned drug-addicts."
  • pp. 895-896: the gorgeous nurse with bedpan and Fleet enema, twirling them gunslinger-style; the projected romance instantly curdling into geriatric grotesque; Serenity Prayer; "Hug those knees like they were your Sweetie, is what we say."

Themes in this scene

  • Addiction and Recovery: the book's most direct dramatization of the Disease at work — temptation arrives wearing medical legitimacy, the rationalizations are flawless, and the only countermeasures are crude (a fist) and clichéd (Abide, Ask For Help, the Serenity Prayer), with the sponsor refusing to do the choosing; even the dream is the Disease ("The Spider") arguing.
  • Ghosts and Wraiths: the scene opens in the wraith-visits' wake (swarms of wraiths "way too fast to see"; ghostwords lodged in Gately's head are the wraith's lexical residue) and the whole F.F./M.D. sequence proves as spectral as the wraith — only Joelle's railing certifies the real; God-as-"figurant" imports the wraith's own coinage into Gately's theology.
  • Communication and Solipsism: intubated Gately can't speak, his left-hand writing is cuneiform, nobody tells him the day, and his most urgent communication succeeds only as violence in a dream — while the one person who understood his needs (Joelle, the notebook) may have been understood only in the dream too.
  • Entertainment and the Self: AA's idiom literalized — Substance-memories "clamoring to be Entertained," not to be offered "a tonic and your favorite chair"; the Demerol reverie is a private Entertainment whose pull is rendered as lovingly as the samizdat's.
  • Fathers and Sons: the M.D. mistakes Ferocious Francis for "Mr. Gately Senior" and neither corrects him — the sponsor as the father Gately never had, whose love takes the form of refusing to decide for the son ("He's the only one can decide").
  • Dreams: the whole F.F./Pakistani-M.D. temptation crisis is a dream rendered as waking narration until the crushed-testicle scream wakes Gately (pp. 884-890) — the sponsor's visit dissolving, the chair back at the wall, only Joelle's folded-down railing certifying the real; the Disease argues its airtight case in dream-form, and violence inside the dream is the last honest No.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • Direct continuation of the Gately hospital sequence (scenes 162ff): the wraith's visits and lexicon (FIGURANT and the ghostwords here at pp. 883-884, 895), Joelle's visit and the requested notebook (scene 166, pp. 854-864), prior bedside visitors Ewell, Thrust, and the wraith sharing the same chair (p. 884).
  • "The fish asking about what's water" (p. 891) — Bob Death's parable from the TSBYSCD meeting (pp. 444-445, scene 092).
  • "se offendendo" (p. 894) — the gravediggers' malapropism from Hamlet V.i (for se defendendo), planting the Hamlet frame inside Gately's legal predicament; cf. the novel's grave-digging terminus (scene 003's flash-forward).
  • Endnotes digested: n.354 cross-refers to note 12(a) for Schedule C-III; nn.355-358 brand-name glosses (Anexsia; Levo-Dromoran; Numorphan "kind of a watered-down Dilaudid"; Perwin NX, Canadian, "the Canadians are notoriously insane when it comes to forecasting abuse-potential"); n.359 Librium, "a low-grade Valiumish tranq"; n.360 Percocet as "entry-level oral narcotic" that sends abusers "up the ladder"; n.361 Levsin, an anti-spasmodic.

Forward

  • The shooting being adjudicated: the Lenz/Nucks brawl (pp. 601-619, scene 120); the vanished .44 Item taken by Lenz arms the late-book Lenz thread (the AFR-adjacent endgame); Lenz relapsed in the back-split tux = the fate of his white-wig flight from the fight scene.
  • Fackelmann, Kite, Sorkin, Pamela Hoffman-Jeep, Nooch: this scene's drug-history capsule is the on-ramp to the full Fackelmann catastrophe flashback (pp. 921ff, "the insane scam on Sorkin," Mount Doom, p. 886-887 here); n.363 confirms Kite later crewed the DuPlessis home-invasion (scene 016, pp. 55-60) and that the A.F.R. eventually "got through with him."
  • Ethan From and Gately's English-class doom (p. 884) — set up here, paid off in scene 171 (pp. 905-906), where flunking Sophomore Comp ends his football life.

Notable passages (6)
  • pp. 883-884: "whole swarms of wraiths flitting around the hospital on errands that couldn't affect anybody living" — the wraith cosmology generalized; ghosts-wraiths anchor.
  • p. 888: "no other ideas for keeping the bastard from offering something Gately knows that he's powerless at this moment to refuse" — powerlessness rendered as the reason for the violence; core addiction-recovery extraction.
  • p. 889: "Kid's gonna do what he decides he needs to do for himself… Might want to Ask For Some Help, deciding." — the Crocodile's whole pedagogy in two lines.
  • pp. 890-891: "A somehow deliciously symmetrical buzz… And when you nod off, you sleep like a man of wax" — the Demerol aria; must-quote for the seduction of the Substance.
  • p. 895: "what if God is really the cruel and vengeful figurant Boston AA swears up and down He isn't" — Job-rage in wraith vocabulary; the spiritual crisis of the recovery plot.
  • pp. 895-896: the gunslinger nurse and "Hug those knees like they were your Sweetie" — mortification as the answer to lust and rage alike; tonal signature of the Gately hospital chapters.

What links here Timeline events here (25) · Connected from (8) · Passages quoted here (55) · Motifs (4)

Timeline events here

Connected from

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Motifs