By this time Pamela Hoffman-Jeep had succumbed to the highballs and her own swaddled warmth and was irreversibly swooned, ice or fillip or no, twitching synaptically and murmuring to somebody named Monty that he was certainly no kind of gentleman in her book. But Gately could chart the rest of Fackelmann’s shit-creek’s course for himself. When approached by Fackelmann with a GO BROWN gym-bag of Dr. Wo’s finest wholesale Dilaudid and invited to decamp with him and set up a distrib-matrix for their own drug-empire far far away, Kite would have staggered back in horror at Fackelmann’s obviously not knowing that the bettor Eighties Bill was in fact none other than the son of Sixties Bob, viz. Whitey Sorkin’s personal migrainologist, who Sorkin trusted and confided in as only a massive I.V.-dose of Cafergot can make you trust and confide, and whom Sorkin would undoubtedly tell all about the guy’s own son’s huge win on Yale, and who wasn’t like Ward-and-Wally close with his son, Sixties Bob wasn’t, but naturally kept distant paternal tabs on him, and would certainly have known that E.B.’d in fact bet Brown in an attempt to cozy up to the conic CEO, and so would know that there’d been some kind of mix-up; and also that (Kite’d still be staggering back in horror as all this added up) plus, even if Sorkin somehow didn’t get told of Eighties Bill’s loss and Fackelmann’s scam from Sixties Bill, the fact was that Sorkin’s newest savagest U.S. muscle, Bobby (‘C’) C, old-fashioned smack-addict, copped regular old organic Burmese heroin from this Dr. Wo on a regular basis, and was sure to hear about 300+ grams of wholesale Dilaudid bought by a Fackelmann known to be C’s co-employee off Sorkin … and thus that Fackelmann, who when he came to Kite with the proposition was already in possession of a Brown-Booster bag full of 37,500 10-mg. Dilaudids and minus Sorkin’s 25OK — plus with as Gately later knew only 22K in suicidal-scam-backfire-insurance capital — was already dead: Fackelmann was a Dead Man, Kite would have said, staggering back with horror at Fax’s idiocy; Kite’d have said he could smell FackeJmann already biodegrading from here. Dead as a fucking post, he’d have told Fackelmann, already worrying about being seen sitting there with him in whatever titty bar they were in when Fax hit Kite with the proposal. And Gately, watching P.H.-J. sleep, could not only imagine but Identify fully with how Fackelmann, on hearing Kite say he could smell him dead and why, with how Fackelmann, instead of taking his bagful of Blues and gluing on a goatee and immediately fleeing to climes that’d never even fucking heard of metro Boston’s North Shore — that the Fax-ter’d done what any drug addict in possession of his Substance would do when faced with fatal news and attendant terror: Facklemann’d made a fucking beeline for their luxury-stripped home and familiar safe-feeling hearth and had plopped down and immediately fired up the Sterno cooker and cooked up and tied off and shot up and nailed his chin to his chest and kept it there with staggering quantities of Dilaudid, trying to mentally blot out the reality of the fact that he was going to get demapped if he didn’t take some kind of decisive remedial action at once. Because, Gately realized even then, this was your drug addict’s basic way of dealing with problems, was using the good old Substance to blot out the problem. Also probably medicating his terror by stuffing himself with Peanut M&M’s, which would explain all the wrappers littering the floor of the corner he hadn’t moved from. That thus this is why Fackelmann has been squatting moist and silent in a corner of the living room right outside this very bedroom here for days; this was why the apparent contradiction of the staggering amount of Substance Fackelmann had in the gym-bag next to him together with the cornered-toad look of a man in the great fear one associates with Withdrawal. Charting and thinking, drumming his fingers absently on P.H.-J.’s unconscious skull, Gately realized he could more than empathize with Fackelmann’s flight into Dilaudid and M&M’s, but he now realizes that that was the first time it really ever dawned on him in force that a drug addict was at root a craven and pathetic creature: a thing that basically hides.
The most sexual thing Gately ever did with Pamela Hoffman-Jeep was he liked to unwrap her cocoon of blankets and climb in with her and spoon in real tight, fitting his bulk up close against all her soft concave places, and then go to sleep with his face in her nape. It bothered Gately that he could empathize with Fackelmann’s desire to hide and blot out, but in the retrospect of memory now it bothers him more that he didn’t lie there up next to the comatose girl being bothered for more than a few minutes before he felt the familiar desire that blots out all bother, and that that night he had unwrapped the cocoon of bedding and arisen so automatically in service of this desire. And feels the worst of all that he’d lumbered out of the bedroom in just jeans and belt out to the gloaming living room where Fackelmann was hunched moist and smeary-mouthed in the corner next to a mountain of 10 mg. Dilaudids and his mixing bowl of distilled water and works-kit and Sterno unit, that Gately had lumbered so automatically out to Fackelmann under the pretense — to himself, too, the pretense, was the worst thing — the pretense that he was just going to check on poor old Fackelmann, to maybe try and convince him to take some kind of action, go penitent to Sorkin or flee the clime instead of just hiding there in the corner with his mind in neutral and his chin on his chest and a stalactite of chocolated drool from his lower lip lengthening. Because he knew that the first thing Fackelmann would do when Gately left P.H.-J. and lumbered out to the defur-nished living room would be to fumble in his GoreTex works-kit for a new factory-wrapped syringe and invite Gately to hunker on down and get right with the planet. I.e. ingest some of this mountain of Dilaudid, to keep Fackelmann company. Which to Gately’s shame he did, had done, and no part of the reality of Fackelmann’s creek and the need for action had even been brought up, so intent were they on the Blues’ somnolent hum, blotting everything out, while Pamela Hoffman-Jeep lay wrapped tight in the other room dreaming of damsels and towers — Gately did, he remembers vividly, he let Fackelmann fix them both up but good, and told himself he was doing it to keep Fackelmann company, like sitting up with a sick friend, and (maybe worst) believed it was true.
Little entr’actes of feverish dreams punctuate memories and being conscious, like. He dreams he’s riding due north on a bus the same color as its own exhaust, passing again and again the same gutted cottages and expanse of heaving sea, weeping. The dream goes on and on, without any kind of resolution or arrival, and he weeps and sweats as he lies there, stuck in it. Gately comes sharply around when he feels the little rough tongue on his forehead — not unlike Nimitz the M.P.’s little pet kitten’s hesitant tongue, when the M.P. had still had the kitten, before the mysterious period when the kitten disappeared and the garbage disposal wouldn’t run right for days and the M.P. sat hungover with his notebook at the kitchen table with his blond head in his hands, just sat there for several days, and Gately’s Mom went around pale as hell and wouldn’t go near the kitchen sink for days, and rushed to the bathroom when Gately finally asked what was the deal with the garbage disposal and where was Nimitz. When Gately gets his eyelids unstuck, though, the tongue is not even close to being Nimitz’s. The wraith is back, right by the bed, dressed like before and blurred at the edges in the hat-shadowed spill of hallway-light, and except now with him is another, younger, way more physically fit wraith in kind of faggy biking shorts and a U.S. tank top who’s leaning way over Gately’s railing and … fucking licking Gately’s forehead with a rough little tongue, and as Gately reflexively strikes out at the guy’s map — no man put his tongue on D. W. Gately and lived — he has just enough time to realize the wraith’s breath has no warmth to it, or smell, before both wraiths vanish and a blue forked bolt of pain from his sudden striking-out sends him back against his hot pillow with an arched spine and a tube-impeded scream, his eyes rolling back into the dove-colored light of whatever isn’t quite sleep.