The wraith visitation: the figurant / radical-realism aesthetic, the muted son, and the entertainment made "to reach" him — the "reach-the-son opus" pole

pivotal · Nov YDAU (posthumous)

• When: Nov YDAU, over several nights in Gately's St. Elizabeth's Trauma Wing room (the wraith has been "sitting... for the wraith-equivalent of three weeks")
• What: A "tall sunken-chested man in black-frame glasses and a sweatshirt with old stained chinos" — "Highwaters" too short for his height, pushing his glasses up in a "morose gesture" — appears to the mute, feverish Gately as "just a plain old wraith, one without any sort of grudge or agenda, just a generic garden-variety wraith" (scene 162). He expounds wraith-physics (movement "at the speed of quanta," speaking only through a person's "own internal brain-voice," which is why "thoughts and insights that were coming from some wraith always just sound like your own thoughts"), planting invasive lexical "ghostwords" (PIROUETTE, LATRODECTUS MACTANS, POOR YORICK) later confirmed real by their recurrence (175). The core is aesthetic-become-confession: the wraith explains figurants — the silent human-furniture extras of filmed entertainment — and reveals "he personally spent the vast bulk of his own former animate life as pretty much a figurant," and that in his own cartridges he made sure "you could bloody well hear every single performer's voice," a "real egalitarian babble of figurantless crowds" the critics dismissed as pose "instead of radical realism." This tips into the reach-the-son motive: he watched "his own personal youngest offspring, a son, the one most like him," become "blank, inbent, silent, frightening, mute" — "No horror on earth or elsewhere could equal watching your own offspring open his mouth and have nothing come out" — and his "last resort" was entertainment: "Make something so bloody compelling it would reverse thrust on a young self's fall into the womb of solipsism, anhedonia, death in life... A way to say I AM SO VERY, VERY SORRY and have it heard." He avers "he spent the whole sober last ninety days of his animate life working tirelessly to contrive a medium via which he and the muted son could simply converse." A second, "younger, way more physically fit wraith" (a Lyle-figure) accompanies him once (175). Gately, unconvinced, reads it as "gross self-pity... wraith or no," and can't tell whether the visitor is a Higher-Power epiphany or the Disease angling him toward Demerol (162); he later half-doubts the whole interlude was "just as much a febrile hallucination" (175). [WRAITH CRUX, bearing on the final film and the death: the wraith's identity — he is NEVER named "Incandenza" anywhere in the text; wraith=JOI rests entirely on convergent detail (the filmography and lens obsession, the Wild Turkey, the itinerant Southwest boyhood, the mute youngest son "the one most like him," ghostwords LATRODECTUS MACTANS / POOR YORICK matching JOI's production companies) — his reality (dream vs visitation), his benignity, and whether the final film was truly made "to reach Hal" are surfaced at maximum richness and RESOLVED NOWHERE — this is the third, "reach-the-son opus" pole against Joelle's "joke" (event 16) and the AFR/U.S.O.U.S. "verifiably lethal" (event 19).]