Proleptic cross-reference: Gately's fever-dream of the "sad kid" digging up a dead man's head

texture · ~17-20 Nov YDAU

• When: ~Nov YDAU (Gately hospitalized, post-shooting; the hospital serial dated c. 17-20 Nov per the archive's dating rulings)
• What: [Not a Hal-present event — a proleptic cross-reference.] In Gately's St. Elizabeth's fever-dream he is in a graveyard with "a very sad kid," "digging some dead guy's head up and it's really important, like Continental-Emergency important," while Gately is too hungrily eating corporate snacks to dig; the sad kid "moves his mouth but nothing comes out" (the not-speaking motif again), and finally "holds something terrible up by the hair and makes the face of somebody shouting in panic: Too Late." By the novel's frame the sad kid reads as Hal and the head as JOI's (the buried master cartridge), prefiguring the Year-of-Glad Hal-Gately digging (see event 122). The scene's dominant Fackelmann/Pamela Hoffman-Jeep material is Gately's story and is skipped.