The wraith's retelling: the blank wooden man, the bottle, and the boyhood re-narrated from beyond

texture · Nov YDAU (the hospital bedside); resolves nothing

• When: Nov YDAU, at Don Gately's hospital bed
• What: The record's last pass over him is the strangest-sourced: the unnamed wraith at Gately's bedside — never identified in the text; the convergent details are the son's — re-narrates the whole father-story as the first link in a chain of disappearing sons: "your whole itinerant lonely Southwest and West Coast boyhood trying unsuccessfully to convince your father that you even existed." In the wraith's account the family had accused him of "confusing the boy with his own (the wraith’s) boyhood self, or with the wraith’s father’s father, the blank wooden man who according to family mythology had ‘driven’ the wraith’s father to ‘the bottle’ and unrealized potential and an early cerebral hemorrhage" — this page's subject compressed into one clause: the bottle, the unrealized potential, the early hemorrhage, and the cause laid a generation further up, all wrapped in the double hedge "according to family mythology." [Attribution note: wraith-narrated, Gately-POV, fever-and-Dilaudid-adjacent; the wraith's identity and the retelling's reliability are open in the text and stay open here — this entry records the telling, not the events.]