The dead man in Gately's head: Remember-Whenning, and the dread of Nuckslaughter

texture · YDPAH sobriety through Nov YDAU

• When: running from Gately's early Ennet House sobriety (the Sergeant-at-Arms epiphany) through the Nuck brawl (night of 11 Nov YDAU) into the hospital serial (c. 12-20 Nov)
• What: DuPlessis's longest afterlife is in his killer's conscience — entirely as epithet, since Gately never learned the name. In the epiphany that first puts Gately on his knees, Boston AA's "Sergeant at Arms" waits "In the home of a snot-strangled Canadian VIP and the office of an implacable Revere A.D.A. whose wife has opted for dentures at thirty-five" — his own crime, filed among the places the Disease waits. Mid-brawl with the vengeance-seeking Nucks outside Ennet House, "Gately cops a black surge of Remember-Whenning, the babbling little football-head Québecer he'd killed by gagging a man with a bad cold. This line of thinking is intolerable." In the Trauma Wing the dead man is the thing Gately cannot share even in sobriety's total-honesty program — "Pat didn't know about the remorseless A.D.A. or the suffocated Nuck" — and the projected future he must Abide past is precise: "the fear of getting convicted of Nuckslaughter, of V.I.P.-suffocation; of a lifetime on the edge of his bunk in M.C.I. Walpole, remembering." The apparatus fixes the death's place in Gately's moral ledger: "the thing with the suffocated Canadian P.I.T., which anyway occurred much later and when Gately was way more nonviolence-prone" — the most professionally horrified he had ever been. The record leaves Gately unarrested and untraced-to as the serial ends; DuPlessis's death remains, in the story, an open file.