Scene 185: fackelmann sunshine beach

• pp. 972-973: the frame — R.N. yanks her hand from his forehead with a yelp; Chandler F. in "the classic resident-confiteor position"; the House Manager explains Pat's absence (she had to kick her own relapsed daughter out, too spiritually shaky to come); the M.D.: "Up it to 30 q 2 and Let's Try Doris" (n.385: Doryx, "the Cruise missile of gram-negative antibiotics"); "the poor son of a bitch was burning down" — no one addressing Gately, "his input unrequired."
• p. 973: "Asking For Help to refuse Demerol. He kept trying to say addict."; Maura Duffy/"attic" playground memory; the brain-voice: "never try and pull a weight that exceeds you"; "He heard the late Gene Fackelmann saying to get a load of this"; the Crocodile Lenny's slogan — "The truth will you set you free, but not until it's done with you"; Gately imagines the A.D.A. praying he'll live for M.D.C.-Walpole.
• pp. 973-974: dying contemplated without serenity ("more like trying to pull something heavier than you"); the hall voices that keep conversing past his open door; "It was impossible to imagine a world without himself in it"; Beverly High memory — walking away from a gay-bashing "disgusted by both sides of the conflict"; Walpole homosexuality imagined in cartoon detail; "He saw the A.D.A. with his head bowed and his hat against his chest."
• p. 974: the ice-bath's "upward movement deep inside" wakes him into the flashback — dawn, one eye swollen shut, Fackelmann mumbling "something that consisted totally of g's"; Pamela Hoffman-Jeep windmilling in the tree at the window; her face falls away and is replaced by Bobby C's two-finger salute; C eyeballs Mt. Dilaudid, punches through the double-pane, lets himself in.
• p. 975: C checks Fackelmann's pupils, clucks; catches Gately over the ear with the Taurus PT 9 mm. ("It wasn't stars he saw"), kicks him in the balls "S.O.P. to keep your man down"; the entourage: DesMonts and Pointgravè ("too Canadianly dumb for anything but the brutalest work"), the pharmacist's assistant with the black Dr.-bag, three big girls in red leather, P.H.-J. borne in by two punks and dropped screaming onto a box of counterfeit Commonwealth seals, white shin-bone showing.
• pp. 975-977: "Party Time" — individual bottles of Jack Daniels; the bland corporate man rehangs the TP and inserts a cartridge: the still of Sorkin's National Cranio-Facial Pain Foundation portrait (a red fist pulling brain out of his skull) "presiding over the gathering in a mute pained way"; the librarian threads a needle; C's toast to "Gene Gene the Fax Machine" and his "serious fucking-A score"; Gately clocks the Adam's apples ("transvestals"), then the real terror: these are C's people, not Sorkin's — "Sorkin's painting on the wall was symbolic of Sorkin wasn't coming," C has "free rain" (sic).
• pp. 977-978: C's quiet message — Whitey knows Donnie wasn't in on the score against Sorkin and Eighties Bill; kick back, "let Fackelmann face his own music," no "19th-century notions of defending the weak"; apology for the beating; Fackelmann Narcan'd via neck artery (n.386), head bouncing off the wall; the Linda McCartney CD — backup vocals and tambourine isolated by Kurtzweil remixer, "her voice sounding so lost... past cruel... like drilling a peephole in the wall of a handicapped bathroom."
• p. 979: the syringe for Gately — "It's pharm-grade Sunshine" (n.387: Talwin-PX, Sanofi Canada; the main text at p. 979 explains U.S. Talwin-NX carries naloxone "to cut the buzz" — n.388 itself gives only the trade name); "Hold on to your heart"; meanwhile the librarian sews Fackelmann's eyelids open — "As in they were sewing poor old Count Faxula's eyes open"; Gately's reflexive jerk; C, hugging him tight: "'Easy.'"
• pp. 979-980: the hydrochloride taste "of the smell of every Dr.'s office everywhere"; Gately's last sums while he still can — not a hot shot, too much trouble, "Too they wouldn't have got him. Him. Got him off."; the fluid-in-eye recognition — "he'd seen the fluid-in-eye thing in a cartridge or movie the M.P.'d liked... the one about ultra-violence and sadism" (A Clockwork Orange; "Gately thinks sadism is pronounced 'saddism'"); the Sunshine "crossed the barrier and came on."
• pp. 980-981: "The very air of the room bulged. It ballooned."; legs "opting out — attack of floors and sidewalks"; C taking his weight, "moving around him like a dancer to slow the fall," "C was going to protect Bimmy Don from the bad floor's assault"; the rotary view — Pointgravè vomiting, red coats "aflame" with the exploding window-light, the TP viewer stretched on its wire toward Fackelmann's pried-wide piratical eye, the bland man blind-high and missing with the dropper, a transvestite's hand on the unconscious P.H.-J.'s thigh; "Gene and Linda were both screaming."
• p. 981: the last rotating sight — the toughs "coming back through the door, holding big shiny squares of the room"; Gately looks into the held mirror and sees "a reflection of his own big square pale head with its eyes closing as the floor finally pounced." Then the full stop's other side: "And when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out."

Backward

• Completes the Fackelmann arc threaded through the hospital serial: scenes 171 (pp. 902-906), 173 (pp. 911-916: the Sorkin/Eighties Bill scam laid out, Kite's role), 175 (pp. 916-934: the Dilaudid mountain — "Mt. Dilaudid" is coined at p. 935 — P.H.-J., the wraith and the dream of digging up a head with "a very sad kid"), 177 (pp. 934-938: getting high with Fax); "the late Gene Fackelmann" (p. 973) confirms Fax's death.
• The A.D.A. seen with bowed head and hat to chest (pp. 973-974) is really there: scene 182 shows him paralyzed outside this room mid-Ninth-Step; Gately's Walpole-prayer reading inverts the truth — the file is already tossed.
• Pamela Hoffman-Jeep's arc (introduced p. 465, scene 095; major in pp. 921, scene 175ff) ends here unconscious with a compound fracture and a stranger's hand on her thigh — "the single passivest person Gately ever met" (p. 924) ending in total passivity.
• Talwin: a standard of Gately's using years, "favoring Demerol and Talwin" at twenty-seven (scene 016, p. 55); n.387/n.388's PX/NX distinction is why the dose detonates — the pharmacology of the relapse mirrors the Demerol question in the frame.
• The mirror-finish: Gately's reflected "big square pale head" rhymes with Hal's mirror-checked face in YG (scene 001) and the book's lens/mirror chain (scene 099's prisms; n.24's optics).
• "Ready" bookend: the last thing Gately hears before St. E.'s is "Ready?" over the gurney (pp. 619-620 turn, scene 120's close), and the chapter's last waking beat before the final dream-memory is "Somebody overhead asked somebody else if they were ready" + the gripped head and "upward movement deep inside" (p. 974) — the hospital frame closes on the same word it opened with.
• ENDING-DEBATE TOUCHPOINTS (pointers, not adjudication — see The Ending: State of the Debate): (1) the beach line as the designed terminus — Wallace to Pietsch: "We know exactly what's happening to Gately by end"; (2) annular return — the chronologically last scene is scene 001 (YG), so the text's circle closes "beyond the right frame"; (3) the beach as Gately's bottom-then-detox reading (he survives the Sunshine, comes to on the North Shore sand) vs. coma/death readings of the fever-frame; (4) the grave-digging convergence — Gately's dream (p. 934) and Hal's p. 17 "Gately and I dig up my father's head" against scene 184's "Where Is The Master Buried" and the n.234 burial ruling (scene n234); (5) "the tide was way out" as the final annular/entropic image — water, the Concavity's cycles, Lenz's "the rain in the sea" lineage. The archive's full inventory of positions lives in The Ending: State of the Debate and its cited sources.

• p. 973: "His input unrequired." / "He kept trying to say addict." — the frame's whole drama in two short sentences.
• p. 973: "The truth will you set you free, but not until it's done with you." — Lenny's Crocodile slogan; anchor passage for addiction-recovery.
• p. 976: "Sorkin's painting on the wall was symbolic of Sorkin wasn't coming" — Gately's dawning read of the room; absent authority presiding by image alone.
• p. 978: "having her shaky off-key little voice flushed from the cover of the whole slick multitrack corporate sound and pumped up to solo was to Gately unspeakably depressing... past cruel" — the Linda McCartney riff; figurant-exposure as torture; key for communication-solipsism.
• p. 979: "As in they were sewing poor old Count Faxula's eyes open." — the Entertainment's forced-spectation logic made flesh.
• p. 981: "he looked into the square and saw clearly a reflection of his own big square pale head with its eyes closing as the floor finally pounced" — the novel's last mirror.
• p. 981: "And when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out." — the final sentence; essential anthology passage for annularity and the ending file.