Scene 175: fackelmann scam wraith returns

• pp. 916-917: Fackelmann's hidden history of getting over on Sorkin (unphoned long-shot action, pocketed skeet plus vig [n.372]); the frame of the era — Gately on the three-month bail Sorkin bonded, working serious burglary with two lesbian pharmaceutical-coke addicts' Peabody/Wakefield cleaning-and-key-copying operation; Sorkin's bad-news new operative Bobby C: fuchsia three-spike hair, no lips, boot-knife-bared forearm patches, claims to collect ears — "the only I.V.-heroin addict Gately'd come across that actually preferred violence."
• pp. 917-918: posthumous discovery — $22K in mint O.N.A.N. scrip taped under Fackelmann's porn-cartridge case (the iron-willed worst-case stake); Gately splits it with Kite, then hands his half to Sorkin — not from fear but guilt and "to try and cheer Sorkin up. Let him know somebody cared" — after Sorkin's week in bed with sleep-shades, VO, and a shaken "whole faith in the human creature"; Kite's half goes to Dead bootlegs and a semiconductor-cooled D.E.C. 2100, then into his arm; post-Billerica, the once-mighty Kite can't dicky an alarm, and Gately's being the brains of the team marks "his own high-angle decline."
• pp. 918-920: the room now — the R.N. ("Cathy or Kathy"; Gately prefers "the R.N.") and twelve-looking Dr. Pressburger assemble a glittering back-brace/skull-halo on the empty bed; Gately's insight that M.D.s, A.D.A.s, P.O.s — "the fearsomest authority figures in a drug addict's life" — are the grown bullied wienie kids; the EMBRASURE of windowlight through her legs and CIRCUMAMBIENT sexual tension — ghostwords; sick longing, self-pity, and mortification over the witnessed dump.
• pp. 920-921: medical cross-talk — Pendleton's 16-mm siphuncular nebulizer and Mucomyst [n.373] against suspected tracheal fragment trauma vs. Pressburger's recited objections (Morbid Trauma Quarterly, hemoptysis condescension); Gately listening "with the uncomprehending close attention of like a child whose parents are discussing something adultly complex"; the R.N.'s gentle sarcasm sails over the M.D.; threat of a 1600h sponge bath; her lotion is Pat Montesian's brand.
• pp. 921-922: the head-on realization cascade — Stavros L. hired halfway-house cleaners to pay bupkis and Gately'd been in Denial about it; embrasure was the wraith's word; no pen and paper has come, so maybe Joelle's snapshot visit (in Erdedy's sweatpants) was febrile hallucination — or the Finest are interdicting writing supplies to keep him "trapped in himself, a figurant, mute," pre-interrogation; the catatonics catalogue (the House's catatonic lady, the #5 Shed gang, "the wraith's nonexistent kid"); Mr. Bouncety-Bounce at 1600h and no remote, no voice, no advocate.
• pp. 922-923: the Kaopectate-light late-afternoon dread — the lifelong winter pre-sunset terror Gately has always blocked with violence, Substances, the kitchen, or front-row Meetings — dating "all the way back to being alone in his XXL Dentons and crib below Herman the Ceiling That Breathed."
• p. 923 (new section): alone like the toddler whose Mom and her companion were passed out — "worse off than a toddler that could at least bellow"; this gray hour is when the wraith came yesterday; admitting he'd liked it — "The dialogue. The give-and-take. The way the wraith could seem to get inside him," best thoughts as "communiqués from the patient and Abiding dead"; wondering if his organic ironworker father is dead and dropping in; then the deep-focus Fackelmann memories begin.
• pp. 923-926: Pamela Hoffman-Jeep — "his first girl ever with a hyphen": nightly swooning with a clunk, automatic love for any man "chivalrous" [n.374] enough not to Take Advantage; Fackelmann hands her over in the Pourhouse lot with South-Sea-culture advice Gately ignores, locking himself in; her "Night-Errand"; "the single passivest person Gately ever met," a "sexual papoose," Death's Poster-Child (Fackelmann's coinage); Kite's surefire pickup lines (the Margaret Thatcher compliment; "I'm unusually confident that I could achieve an erection"); Gately's Demerol-nod clairvoyance of her face sliding off her skull into lounge-haghood — "more compassion than horror, which Gately never even considered might qualify him as a decent person"; her white-glove "Don Honey, bring Mommy a highball" impression; her Mom met only at E.R.s and sanitaria.
• pp. 926-928: the scam, free-associated out of P.H.-J. (skull-flicks and ice cubes down the prom gown): Fackelmann squatting for two weeks over his Sterno and twin hills of Dilaudid and M&M's "like some sort of cornered toad"; Eighties Bill (Zegna, red suspenders, FREE MILKEN Beamer sticker, fourth marriage to third aerobics instructor) bets $125K on Brown (–2) against his Yale "almometer"; Sorkin's away at the National Cranio-Facial Pain Foundation with Dr. Robert ("Sixties Bob") Monroe — Sandoz intern, original Leary West-Newton acid circle, Dead-fanatic, haggling trader and informal fence for Kite; Gwendine O'Shay (truncheon-softened skull, lottery-claim grandmother, shillelagh, 110 wpm) takes the bet backwards: Yale (–2).
• pp. 928-929: the moles' intelligence — Yale's power forward diagnosed with Post-Coital Vestibulitis [n.375]; Brown's recruited sirens stationed from I-95 rest-stops to a sensually-appointed locker, cheerleaders pantyless "to help lend a pyrotechnic glandular atmosphere"; O'Shay green-lights what she thinks is a mortal lock; then game night — Brown's Dworkinite Female Objectification Prevention And Protest Phalanx storms the Pizzitola on unmuffled Hawgs, sirens carried off, two siren-wrung Brown starters felled, Yale "cleans Brown U.'s clock by upwards of 20."
• pp. 929-930: the double payout — Fackelmann collects E.B.'s $137.5K skeet downtown, then in Saugus is handed a bulging Mass Lottery box of $112.5K in ones, Sorkin (lobster-eyed in screen goggles, philosophical: "Veteran books tend to be statistically philosophical") believing E.B. won; Fackelmann's mustache roils as "a high-watt bulb… slowly beginning to incandesce"; the mental spreadsheet: ~250K = ~375 grams of Dr. Wo's hydromorphone [n.376] = ~$1.9M street, if Kite decamps with his D.E.C. to build a distribution matrix "far far away."
• p. 931: why he was already dead, as Kite would have staggered to explain: Eighties Bill is Sixties Bob's son — Sorkin's trusted, Cafergot-IV-bonded migrainologist keeps "distant paternal tabs" and will mention the win/loss; and Bobby C cops his Burmese organic from the same Dr. Wo who'd see Fackelmann buy 300+ wholesale grams; "Kite'd have said he could smell Fackelmann already biodegrading from here."
• pp. 931-933: instead of fleeing, Fackelmann beelines home, fires the Sterno, and nails his chin to his chest — "your drug addict's basic way of dealing with problems"; Gately's dawning thesis: "a drug addict was at root a craven and pathetic creature: a thing that basically hides"; the tenderest Gately material — the most sexual thing he ever did with P.H.-J. was unwrap her cocoon and spoon "with his face in her nape" — and the most damning: he rose from beside her "so automatically in service of this desire," under the pretense (to himself too — "the pretense, was the worst thing") of checking on poor old Fackelmann, and let Fax fix them both, "like sitting up with a sick friend, and (maybe worst) believed it was true."
• pp. 933-934: feverish entr'actes — the due-north bus dream past the same gutted cottages and heaving sea, no arrival; the rough little tongue (memory of Nimitz, the M.P.'s kitten, and the garbage-disposal horror) — the wraith back at bedside with "another, younger, way more physically fit wraith in kind of faggy biking shorts and a U.S. tank top" licking Gately's forehead; Gately strikes out ("no man put his tongue on D. W. Gately and lived"), notices the wraith-breath "has no warmth to it, or smell," and the pain arches him into not-quite-sleep; cubist flu-dreams (the empty mirror he keeps wiping; the too-vivid pool-blue; "He's both in a bag and holding a bag"); visitors flit but "never Ferocious Francis or Joelle van D."; the grave-dream — he and a very sad kid digging up a dead guy's head, "Continental-Emergency important," Gately the best digger but irresistibly hungry, eating two-fisted from economy bags of corporate snacks; the kid's mouth moves with no sound; winged, underwearless Joelle asks if they knew him; the kid holds something terrible up by the hair, mouthing: Too Late.

Backward

• The wraith's first visit (JOI's figurant/lenses confession, ~pp. 829-845) is "yesterday"; Joelle's snapshot visit (pp. 861-863, scene 166) is now in epistemic doubt for Gately — the hallucination-or-not question the text leaves open.
• Burial site: the adopted n.234 ruling — JOI in Avril's family plot, Québec, "Heart of the Concavity"; corroborated by scene 172's St. Adalbert funeral (p. 910).
• Dr. Wo and Hung Toy's: the Chinatown dealer of the yrstruly/Poor Tony thread (pp. 128-135, scene 040) — the two crime-world strata of the book touch here.
• Sixties Bob Monroe: Sandoz/Leary pedigree and compulsive trading of 60s paraphernalia make him a strong (unstated) candidate for the V-flashing sixties relic who bartered the eighteen DMZ lozenges to Bertraund Antitoi (pp. 481-482, scene 097; the archive's Bertraund Antitoi entry) — if so, the DMZ's chain of custody runs Sandoz→Sixties Bob→Antitoi→Pemulis; proposed for the archive's catalog, flagged as inference.
• Stavros L. realization: continues the Denial-audit of his "sunlights on the side" employment (pp. 434-436, scene 090); the figurant/catatonics catalogue points back to the wraith's figurant doctrine and to the #5 Shed catatonics and "the wraith's nonexistent kid" (Hal as perceived by JOI).

Forward

• The grave-dream (p. 934) is the third leg of the novel's most famous triangle: Hal's Year-of-Glad memory "John N. R. Wayne… standing watch in a mask as Donald Gately and I dig up my father's head" (scene 003, p. 17) and Joelle's closing bet that the Master is buried with JOI "in your annulation-zone" (scene 178, pp. 940-941); the sad kid mouthing soundlessly = Hal post-DMZ/post-whatever; "Too Late" is the dream's verdict on the whole race for the Master. Hal's own funeral memory of the dough-plump mound is three scenes back (scene 172, p. 907).
• Bobby C: this era's introduction of the C who later runs the eyelid-sewing crew in the novel's final scene (pp. 972-981, scene 185); his Wo connection is the tripwire Fackelmann hits.
• The chronology strain (with scene 173): "over four years later" (p. 937, scene 177's frame) and n.376's YWQMD pricing vs. "last New Year's Eve of Unsubsidized Time" (p. 915) — cited as written.
• Gately's never-with-a-healthy-girl confrontation (p. 919) and the R.N. material feed the Joelle thread — his shame-laden, chivalric attraction — as does P.H.-J. as his template for loving the helpless.

• p. 918: "his whole faith in the human creature shaken, he'd wept to Gately over the cellular phone" — Sorkin the neurotic book as betrayed parent; why Gately gives the money back.
• p. 920: "It'd be CIRCUMAMBIENT sexual tension, would be the ghostword." — the wraith's lexical possession of Gately in real time; ghosts-wraiths anchor.
• p. 922: "it was like he was trapped inside his huge chattering head… a figurant, mute" — the figurant condition named; pairs with scene 001.
• pp. 922-923: the late-day dread paragraph ("the gray-light late-afternoon dread, always worse in winter… below Herman the Ceiling That Breathed") — depression-anhedonia anchor; the crib continuity with the Dilaudid hallucination (p. 915) and the playpen rising (p. 938).
• p. 923: "his best thoughts were really communiqués from the patient and Abiding dead" — the wraith-doctrine Gately half-accepts; the book's theology of the dead in one line.
• pp. 931-932: "a drug addict was at root a craven and pathetic creature: a thing that basically hides." — the scene's thesis.
• p. 933: "under the pretense — to himself, too, the pretense, was the worst thing — that he was just going to check on poor old Fackelmann" — self-deception anatomized at the exact moment of relapse.
• p. 934: the grave-dream entire ("the sad kid… makes the face of somebody shouting in panic: Too Late.") — the novel's endgame in dream form.