The chair he sat in: Thrust as reference point in Gately's visitor succession

texture · ? Nov YDAU (after the visit)

• When: ? Nov YDAU — the nights after the bedside visit (scene 162 "Sometime later, at night"; scene 169 later in the hospital stretch)
• What: Thrust's last attestations are as a fixed point other visitors are measured against. Geoffrey Day appears at night "sitting where Thrust had sat but with the chair turned around the right way and with his legs primly crossed" — the chair's orientation itself distinguishing the prim resident from the straddling counselor. Later, Gately, wondering why no police or federal men have visited him yet "if they've been all over the House like hamsters on wheat already, as Thrust had said," is still navigating his legal dread by Thrust's report. And when his sponsor finally comes: "Ferocious Francis is sitting in the chair that the wraith and Ewell and Calvin Thrust had all sat in" — the novel's own list of Gately's bedside company, with Thrust named between the wraith and the sponsor. Thrust does not appear in person again in the book.