Gately and Joelle in the front office: the veil, U.H.I.D., mutual exposure

texture · Wed 11 Nov YDAU (2009), 0450h

• When: Wednesday 11 Nov YDAU (2009), 0450h, front office
• What: A pre-dawn all-dialogue duet that stages the House's front-office night-desk as a place of raw exchange. Joelle, three days in, wanders into the office where Gately is finishing the overnight Log; they trade worst-things-seen (his Lowell bar shooting, her chainsaw hand-amputation "back of the Cumberland") and Joelle lays out the whole U.H.I.D. doctrine of hiding openly — a wholly separate fellowship whose agenda she contrasts against "the drug-recovery agenda, the AA and NA program" — while diagnosing Gately's buried shame at thinking himself unbright. Ordinary resident business passes across the same desk (word to be sent to Johnette that Kate and Ken don't want to be made to return to the Waltham NA meeting where Erdedy was nearly attacked, ev9). See Joelle's timeline (event 41) for the U.H.I.D./veil material. Thread value: the scene shows Ennet House's Staff-resident intimacy at 0450h and plants Gately's recognition-to-come of Joelle's radio voice (paid off in the fracas, event 15).