The afterlife in memory: Dilaudid's most famous casualty

texture · YDAU present (St. E.'s Trauma Wing)

• When: the YDAU hospital present in which the whole biography is recalled
• What: Across Gately's fevered, drug-refusing hospital days, "the late Gene Fackelmann" recurs as the cautionary ghost of Dilaudid. When the (dream-)M.D. tempts him with "titrated hydromorphone hydrochloride," Gately names it in memory as "Death on a Ritz. The Blue Bayou. Gene Fackelmann's killer, by and large" — Fackelmann's "eliminated map after the insane scam on Sorkin and a disastrous two nights of Dilaudid." As Gately himself nears death of infection (scene 185), he "heard the late Gene Fackelmann saying to get a load of this." Fackelmann's end functions, in the Gately thread, as the memento mori against which Gately's own sober refusal of narcotics is measured.