"Party Time": C runs the Fackelmann reckoning — the novel's closing scene

pivotal · UNDATED (end of the same era; in the story BEFORE event 5)

• When: the morning after the ~two-day Dilaudid binge, same Unsubsidized-era winter; in the story this precedes the Dec YDPAH hotshot (C is alive here) despite its last-pages placement
• What: The novel's final scene, inside Gately's fever-memory: Pamela Hoffman-Jeep's face at the apartment window is "replaced by the face of Bobby ('C') C," who "raised a slow two-finger salute to his temple in an impassively mocking Hello," waggles a six-pack of Hefenreffer "like wanting in," then punches through the double-pane, climbs in with glass in his purple hair and a vintage Taurus-PT 9 mm. in his spike-studded belt, checks Fackelmann's pupils, smiles warmly down at Gately — and pistol-whips him over the ear and kicks him in the balls, "S.O.P. to keep your man down." He returns at the head of his own entourage — DesMonts and Pointgravè ("Canadian Harvard Square small-time thug-types"), red-leather transvestites, a pharmacist's assistant with a black bag, a librarianish little woman with needle and thread — declares (asking and answering himself in falsetto) "Yes indeedyweedy it was Party Time," and proposes a toast under a wall-hung portrait of Whitey Sorkin: the sign, Gately slowly grasps, that these are C's people, that Sorkin isn't coming, "that Sorkin had given Bobby C free rain on this piece of painful business" ("free rain" as printed). C's management of Gately is almost courtly: he relays that Whitey knows "Donnie wasn't part of Fackelmann's score," says he's "sorry about the bit of the beating," wants no beef later, and holds Gately upright with one arm through what follows — the pharmacist booting Gately with "pharm-grade Sunshine" (glossed n.387 as pentazocine hydrochloride, Canadian Talwin-PX) while C says "Hold on to your hat," then "Hold on to your heart"; when Gately jerks reflexively toward Fackelmann, "C hugged him tight with one arm. 'Easy,' C said very softly." Around them C's crew administers Fackelmann's "music": Narcan to bring him up, his eyelids sewn open to his brows with eyedrops dripped in — staging, Gately registers, out of "the one about ultra-violence and sadism" — while C's depressing car CD (the Linda-McCartney-only Wings remix, "past cruel... somehow sadistic-seeming") plays. Gately goes under with "Bobby C's squat face looked almost pretty, tragic, half lit by the window, tucked up under Gately's spinning shoulder"; the last rotating sight is Orientals carrying in "big shiny squares of the room" — mirrors — "As the floor wafted up and C's grip finally gave." What was then done to Fackelmann, and by whom finally, the scene does not show; it ends on the beach of Gately's coming-to. [Attribution note: entirely Gately-focalized memory under fever and, by the end, under the Sunshine.]