IJ study archive

Scene 177: dilaudid binge

Scene
177
Pages
934–938
When
frame: ?/20 Nov YDAU (2009), St. E.'s (one heart-monitor intrusion, p. 937); flashback: the next ~two days after scene 175's relapse, end of Unsubsidized Time ('In his stuporous recall over four years later,' p. 937 — a chronology wrinkle, see scene 175)
Where
the stripped luxury apartment, North Shore (Fackelmann's corner, Mt. Dilaudid, the wall-hung TP viewer); frame: St. E.'s Trauma Wardin: Boston North Shore (Beverly/Salem/Danvers) · St. Elizabeth's Hospital (Trauma Wing) (also)
POV
Don Gately (3rd person limited, inside the remembered binge's honey-time)

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Open questions this scene bears on

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 3)

Summary

The binge itself, "the ICBM of binges": next morning finds Gately and Fackelmann still in the corner, belts on arms, scaling Mt. Dilaudid at a terrible clip under a recursive slow-motion cartridge loop of nothing but flames. Kite declines to partake and flees with every piece of hardware he owns; Pamela Hoffman-Jeep does her A.M. routine and leaves; and time goes to honey — every attempted conversation answered by Fackelmann's all-purpose "That's a goddamn lie," the ringing phone and door buzzer experienced as pure environment rather than signal, both men wetting themselves and rolling Peanut M&M's into the spreading urine, eventually cooking up with urine when the distilled water runs out. Fackelmann has a convulsion and a bowel movement and seems to bounce back; Gately runs out of veins in one arm. When the buzzer finally carries P.H.-J.'s drunken voice late at night, Gately hauls himself up like a toddler at playpen bars to let her in, and the floor "dodged his foot and rushed up at him" — he goes down on his temple and grays out facing Fackelmann, who is holding out his hand-spider and telling it that it is witnessing the birth of an empire. One frame intrusion mid-scene: Gately's St. E.'s fever spikes and his heart-monitor line develops a serration that sets an amber light flashing down the hall.

What to notice

Watch the paragraphs shrink as the binge distends: after the long fluid opening, the scene splinters into stranded one-line facts — "The phone rang and rang.", "Eventually the buzzer stopped.", "Fackelmann smelled very bad." — and the lost hours fall into the white space between them; the honey-time the narrator asks you to picture is enacted by the page's own layout, dialogue stripped to bare script with the connective tissue burned off. Agency, meanwhile, migrates out of the men and into the room: Gately trying to stand is "rudely assaulted by the floor", his final rising is "more like the floor lowering", and the sun goes "up and down like a yo-yo" — the world performs all the verbs while the humans supply only chin-drops and one recyclable denial. The narration's own clock goes under with them: "It might of gotten later and then early A.M. again" — the voice sliding into Gately's grammar at the exact moment memory loses the day count. And note the lighting plot: everything outside the "line of fire" of the cartridge-viewer is "dark as a pocket" — the loop of pure flame is the room's sole light source, so the whole bottom is staged, literally, by an Entertainment.

Beats — page-by-page
  • pp. 934-935: next A.M., "still at it, the ingestion, on a hell of a tear… moving like men deep under water"; the ceiling sky-blue and bulging; the flames-loop cartridge (brass lighters, pilot lights, votive candles, Bunsen burners) Fackelmann liked, got from Kite; Kite — knowing Fax is already dead — coughs out a "totally key" software trade-show "in a different area code" and leaves with all his hardware, trailing cables.
  • p. 935: P.H.-J.'s morning routine — vomiting briskly, mousse and blush, the anti-hangover "Phillips Screwdriver" [n.377], "asking if she'd done anything last night she'd have to explain to anybody"; Ciao Bello; rather than curtain the scalding window they binge harder, "flirting with an O.D."; Fackelmann the born binger vs. Gately the maintenance user who, once launched, "might as well have been strapped to the snout of a missile."
  • pp. 935-936: the honey-time dialogues — every Gately probe about where the haul came from cut off with " 's a goddamn lie"; Gately alleging "the roundness of the planet… the blackness of all black dogs" just to harvest the denial; minutes-long exhalations of laughter; Fackelmann wets his pants ("this was even funnier"); the urine pool exploring the oak floor, the cartridge's flames reflected in it.
  • p. 936: "When the phone rang it was just a fact. The ringing was like an environment, not a signal." — Gately points this out; "Fackelmann vehemently denied it"; Gately assaulted by the floor on a stand attempt, wets his own pants; the M&M's-in-urine corrosion game ("a vampire-white football of M&M in a nimbus of bright dye"); the buzzer discussed "the way you discuss wishing it would stop raining."
  • p. 937: the ICBM of binges — Mt. Dilaudid "changed shapes but never really much shrank"; Gately's first-ever vein-exhaustion arm-switch, tying off with his teeth; Fackelmann's spit-string game over Lake Urine ("an intoxicating aura of danger"); Gately's epiphany that "most people like play-danger but don't like real-life danger" takes "gallons of viscous time" to articulate, for the imprimatur of a denial; "More tattoos than teeth" loops unattributed through his bobbing head; Fackelmann's sunset convulsion and bowel movement, Gately too uncoordinated to go to his side — "the nightmarish feeling that there was something crucial he had to do but had forgot what it was"; cooking up with candy-dyed urine when the distilled water runs out.
  • p. 937 (frame): the PARAGON BUS LINES: THE GRAY LINE nod-dream; the St. E.'s realization that this is the bus from the unending dream — and "the sickening realization that the connection between the two buses is itself a dream"; fever to new heights, the serrated heart-monitor line, the amber light at the nurses' station.
  • pp. 937-938: late-night buzzer with P.H.-J.'s voice, "drunk as a Nuck," using party as a verb; Fackelmann's claw becomes a spider climbing his chest; Gately prods his own bladder to check; "Gately reached in the dark for the bars of his playpen, grasped them with pudgy fists, hauled himself to his feet… He wobbled like a toddler"; the floor feints, "circling for an opening"; Fackelmann tells the spider "it was witnessing the birth of an empire"; the missed step, the temple blow, laminates fanning across the wet floor, the viewer falling and casting "ruddled flames on the ceiling"; gray-out facing Fackelmann, who holds the spider out "in mid-air at him for his inspection."

Endnotes

  • n.377 (p. 1078): the Phillips Screwdriver — vodka and Milk of Magnesia — "which Gately finds nauseous and privately refers to as a 'lowball'" (against her "highball").

Themes in this scene

  • Addiction and Recovery: the bottom rendered without sermon — vein-exhaustion, urine-cooking, the crucial-thing-forgotten feeling — the lived data behind every later Gately AA position; the binge as pure hiding (scene 175's thesis) carried to its physical limit.
  • Annularity: literal waste-into-fuel — cooking the next shot with their own candy-dyed urine — plus the recursive flames loop, the yo-yo sun, and the dream-bus that circles "again and again" past the same cottages; the binge as a closed ring excreting and re-ingesting itself.
  • Communication and Solipsism: language collapses to one universal denial (" 's a goddamn lie"); phone and buzzer become signal-less environment — the apparatus of human reach reduced to weather; the call Fackelmann's life depends on goes unanswered because answering has become metaphysically impossible.
  • Entertainment and the Self: the flames cartridge is a toy Entertainment — a loop with no content but pure watchable flicker, viewed chin-on-chest in urine; the viewer literally falls off the wall as the binge's last event, projecting fire on the ceiling.
  • Dreams: the frame's nod-dream — PARAGON BUS LINES: THE GRAY LINE — knots into the unending due-north bus dream, and the St. E.'s realization arrives doubled: this is the bus from the dream, and then "the sickening realization that the connection between the two buses is itself a dream" (p. 937); the narration flags its own dream-status and leaves it standing.
  • Memory and Forgetting: "In his stuporous recall over four years later" (p. 937) — remembering conducted through the very stupor it remembers: the narration's clock goes under with the binge ("It might of gotten later and then early A.M. again"), and the two-buses knot leaves memory and dream no longer separable.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • The "birth of an empire" is Fackelmann's Dilaudid-empire delusion from scene 175's mental spreadsheet (pp. 930-931), now addressed to a hand-spider — the scam's grandiosity at terminal credibility.
  • The playpen/toddler rising (p. 938) closes the crib image-system: the Dilaudid crossing-hallucination (scene 173, p. 915), Herman the Ceiling That Breathed and the alone-in-the-crib dread (scene 175, pp. 922-923), and present-tense Gately mute in a hospital bed "worse off than a toddler" (p. 923).
  • The unanswered phone/buzzer rhyme with Erdedy's phone-vs-buzzer crucifixion (scene 004, pp. 17-27) — the book's two great waiting-for-the-Substance set pieces, one before the binge, one inside it.
  • Mr. Bouncety-Bounce viewing discipline with Kite and Fackelmann (scene 175, p. 922) dates the trio's domestic routine this scene ends forever.

Forward

  • Direct continuation of scene 175's flashback (Gately joins Fackelmann's binge, p. 933) and runs to the threshold of the novel's final scene: the memory completes at pp. 972-981 — P.H.-J. let in, Sorkin's reckoning, Bobby C's crew, the pharmaceutical Sunshine, Fackelmann's sewn eyelids, and Gately's gray-out onto the cold sand — this scene's last image (floor, flames, the proffered spider) is its on-ramp.
  • The gray bus dream knots the frame and flashback into one recursion (the unending bus dream first appears scene 175, p. 933) — and the narrator flags the knot itself as possibly dreamed; the fever-spike/amber-light intrusion is the plot's live wire: Gately's condition is deteriorating in real time while he remembers.

Notable passages (6)
  • p. 936: "When the phone rang it was just a fact. The ringing was like an environment, not a signal." — signal-collapse under the Substance; anchor passage for communication-solipsism.
  • pp. 935-936: the "That's a goddamn lie" exchanges ("You have to picture all the binge's verbal exchanges as occurring like very slowly, oddly distended, as if the time were honey") — Fackelmann's epitaph-in-life; comic and terminal at once.
  • p. 937: "It was the first and only time ever that Gately I.V.'d narcotics so many times in one arm that he ran out of arm-vein" — the ICBM paragraph; bottom quantified.
  • p. 937: "the nightmarish feeling that there was something crucial he had to do but had forgot what it was" — conscience surviving as dread inside anesthesia; key addiction-recovery pointer.
  • p. 938: "Gately reached in the dark for the bars of his playpen… He wobbled like a toddler." — the crib-system's payoff; the regression made flesh just before the gray-out.
  • p. 938: "he heard Fackelmann telling his hand's claw's spider it was witnessing the birth of an empire" — delusion's last broadcast; essential for the Fackelmann arc.

What links here Timeline events here (7) · Connected from (4) · Passages quoted here (38) · Motifs (3)

Timeline events here

Connected from

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Motifs