Coffee-wired, he brings Gately the Tingley suitcase-torment — his fullest scene

pivotal · 11 Nov YDAU (to ~2329h)

• When: 11 Nov YDAU, evening, in Gately's individual-resident-interface window (from just after the Brookline Young People's AA meeting up to about 2329h).
• What: Foss, visibly jittery — Gately opens with "Had a little coffee tonight have we Foss?" and has to coach him through it ("Take a second. Inhale and blow out. I'm not going anywheres") — comes to Staff with an issue he's been pushed toward: "Diehl and Ken are telling me to come in to you with this issue of what's like occurring out there which Erdedy says it's a Staff-type issue and duh-duh duh-duh." The issue is real and protective: "Geoff D. and Nell G. are out in the living room going around to all the new people asking them to think about if their Higher Power is omni-potent enough to make a suitcase that's too heavy for him to lift," and the fragile new kid — Foss fumbles him as "that skittery kid Dingley—" before Gately supplies "Tingley" — is now sitting in the linen closet with his eyes bugging out, "going like He Can but He Can't but He Can, respecting the suitcase." Foss's scruples and tics are all on display: the "duh-duh" verbal stall, the announced ethic "Well Don I hate a cheese-nibbler much as the next man," the anxious pre-clearing that Diehl said "no way it's like ratting," the Hanley-baked tollhouse-butterscotch cookie brought along as social lubricant (Erdedy's ruling: "it's not like kissing ass so much as commonplace decency") and then forgotten in his hand until Gately points at it. And one status datum rides his own relay — "Erdedy says I'm Senior Res." — Foss is the House's Senior Resident. It is the book's one sustained look at Foss speaking, and what it shows is a senior resident doing recovery correctly: protective of a newcomer, deferential to process, honest about his own discomfort.