The hospital confession: the ego cracks — Ewell's Ninth-Step crisis at Gately's bedside

pivotal · ~12-15 Nov YDAU

• When: ~12-15 November YDAU, St. Elizabeth's Trauma Wing (Gately's first nights there after being shot in the Lenz/Canadian "fracas")
• What: The emotional center. The night of the fracas, the buried Money-Stealers' Club interval (event 1) returned to Ewell "vividly and completely" in a dream; he woke minus his goatee, his hair "center-parted in a fashion I haven't favored for forty years," the bed soaked and "a gnawed-looking cake of McDade's special anti-acne soap" in his hand. He comes to the comatose, mute Gately's bedside and — chin on the crib-railing, unsure whether Gately can hear — pours out the whole childhood fraud and its aftermath, then the adult wreckage it may have "informed" (the tax law, the scornful marriage, the drinking). Even here the register holds: he frames Gately's fracas heroics as "your display of reluctant se offendendo" — a Latin blunder the apparatus glosses (n.337) as either befogged muddling of a legal term, a post-Freudian slip, or (least likely) a very oblique jab from a Ewell intimate with Hamlet's graveyard scene. He is stranded on the Program's Ninth Step: "How can I start to make reparations?" — the victims scattered, his father dead since 1993, his mother too frail for the truth. He lodges a formal complaint against "More Will Be Revealed" ("Some things seem better left submerged. No?") and ends, whispered, with "I'm scared" — the first bare thing this fastidious man has said. Gately, mute and burning, cannot answer or even reach across to pat his hand. Corroboration (Calvin Thrust's report, same scene): "something deep in the previously hopelessly arrogant-seeming 'Tiny' Ewell seems like it's broken and melted, spiritually speaking" — he has shaved off "his Kentucky Chicken beard," was heard weeping in the 5-Man head, and was seen secretly taking out the kitchen trash though it wasn't his Chore.