"Still sucking air. In Kentucky." — the photo album at Gately's bedside; last attestations

texture · 11 Nov and ? Nov YDAU

• When: 11 Nov YDAU (Ennet House, Gately's staff-interface night; also the chainsaw telling, event 4) and "? Nov YDAU" (Joelle's visits to the hospitalized Gately)
• What: In the YDAU present the Daddy is alive, in Kentucky, and reachable only through Joelle's voice. Asked-and-answering with Gately at Ennet House: "Can I ask? Is your own personal Daddy still alive?" — "Oh. Oh. My mother's dead. Worm-farming. My own personal Daddy's still sucking air, though. That's how he puts it—still sucking air. In Kentucky." (Scene 112 — the phrase-making credited to the man himself.) At Gately's hospital bed she brings the photo album she'd hauled out the night before: "I wanted to show you my own personal Daddy" — and the record's only physical image of him is a snapshot: "In front of a low white porch-railing, a generic lean old guy with lines around his nose from squinting into sunlight and the composed smile of somebody that's been told to smile," a skinny dog at his side (scene 166, Gately's POV of Joelle's showing). The album pages carry the farm fabric of event 1 — the unnamed pointer "that got hit right after that by a UPS truck out to 104," the bull called Mr. Man, the fence-jumping mule Chet the Daddy had to put down, Chet's Mama lent out to neighbors "to sort of make up for folks' flowers" — and Uncle Lum on a roof. These bedside tellings are the novel's last attestations of Joe Lon van Dyne: not seen, not settled, still sucking air.