Joelle van Dyne's Trauma-Wing bedside visits — the deepening Gately-Joelle bond

pivotal · hospital, A.M. bedside, c. 14-18 Nov YDAU

• When: an A.M. bedside visit during the hospital serial (Joelle can't stay long — all nonworking residents must report for the House's A.M. daily-meditation meeting); Gately mute and feverish in the Trauma Wing. Day-count deliberately blurred (Dating note 7); c. 14-18 Nov YDAU band
• What: In the Trauma Wing, Joelle van Dyne makes bedside visits to the mute, feverish Gately, deepening the mutual bond of the serial (the arc panel between the 0450h front-office night-talk, event 49, and the serial's close). She leans over the bed's crib-railing to wet his big forehead and lips with a cool washcloth, in a lavender brocaded hulpil whose selvage nearly matches her veil, and brings him two cream-cheese brownies liberated from the nurses' station (which she ends up eating, since he's in no shape to swallow). Gately is acutely self-conscious in the presence of this underground-celebrity — holding his face carefully, hesitant to make his "barnyard" moo/mew sounds, even breathing through his nose so she won't smell his unbrushed teeth. The narration turns into Joelle's POV: what's admirable is that he has no idea how heroic or romantic he looks, unshaven and intubated, wounded in service to someone who did not deserve it and refusing narcotics; and she reflects that the last and pretty much only man she ever let herself admire in a romantic way had left without facing up to why, instead erecting a jealous fantasy about her and his own poor father (the man unnamed in the raw — as printed). She reports to the mute Gately last night's St. Columbkill's ("St. Collie's") once-a-month round-robin meeting — the ten-year-blackout Kentucky newcomer Wayne, whose deep diagonal facial furrow ("the Flaw," from his chicken-farmer Daddy's hatchet) Joelle traces across her own veil with a ragged-nailed finger — "trying to give him a little bit of a meeting." Her voice is nothing like her hollow radio-voice, her nails bitten down to the ragged quick just like Gately's, and Gately smiles around his throat-tube. This is his first sober romantic attachment stirring (cf. event 42, "never had sex sober yet"), still one-sided and unspoken.