Gately rolls his eyes way over to the right to see Joelle again, who she’s using both pale hands to get the big book open on her sweatpants’ lap. Gray windowlight shines on clear plastic sheets like little laminates inside the thing.
‘… idea to haul this out last night and was looking at it. I wanted to “show you my own personal Daddy,’ she says. She’s holding the photo album out at him, wide open, like a kindergarten teacher at storytime. Gately makes a production of squinting. Joelle comes over and rests the big album on the top of Gately’s crib-railing, peering down over the top and pointing at a snapshot in its little square sleeve.
‘Right there’s my Daddy.’ 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, half in profile. Gately’s more interested in how the shadow of whoever took the photo is canted into the shot’s foreground, darkening half the dog.
‘And that’s one of the dogs, a pointer that got hit right after that by a UPS truck out to 104,’ she says. ‘Where no animal with a lick of sense would think it had business being. My Daddy never names dogs. That one’s just called the one that got hit by the UPS truck.’ Her voice is different again.
Gately tries to Abide in seeing what she’s pointing at. Most of the rest of the page’s pictures are of farm-type animals behind wooden fences, looking the way things look that can’t smile, that don’t know a camera’s looking. Joelle said her personal Daddy was a low-pH chemist, but her late mother’s own Daddy had left them a farm, and Joelle’s Daddy moved them out there and jick-jacked around with farming, mostly as an excuse to keep lots of pets and stick experimental low-pH stuff in the soil.
At some point in here an all-business nurse comes in and fucks with the I.V. bottles, then hunkers down and changes the catheter-receptacle under the bed, and for a second Gately likes to die of embarrassment. Joelle seems not even to be pretending not to notice.
‘And this right here’s a bull we used to call Mr. Man.’ Her slim thumb moves from shot to shot. The sunlight in Kentucky looks bright-yellower than NNE’s. The trees are a meaner green and have got weird mossy shit hanging from them. ‘And this right here’s a mule called Chet that could jump the fence and used to get at everybody’s flowers out along Route 45 til Daddy had to put him down. This is a cow. This right here’s Chet’s mama. It’s a mare. I don’t recollect any kind of name except “Chet’s Mama.” Daddy’d let her out to neighbors that really did farm, to sort of make up for folks’ flowers.’
Gately nods studiously at each photo, trying to Abide. He hasn’t thought about the wraith or the wraith-dream once since he woke up from the dream where Joelle was Mrs. Waite as a maternal Death-figure. Next life’s Chet’s Mama. He opens his eyes wide to clear his head. Joelle’s head is down, looking down at the open album from overhead. Her veil hangs loose and blank again, so close he could reach his left hand up and lift it if he wanted. The open book she’s moving her hand around in gives Gately an idea he can’t believe he’s only having now. Except he worries because he isn’t left-handed. Which is to say SINISTRAL. Joelle’s got her thumb by a weird old sepia shot of the ass and hunched back of some guy scrabbling up the slope of a roof. ‘Uncle Lum,’ she says, ‘Mr. Riney, Lum Riney, my Daddy’s partner over to the shop, that breathed some kind of fume at the shop when I was little, and got strange, and now he’ll always try and climb up on top of shit, if you let him.’
He winces at the pain of moving his left arm to put a hand on her wrist to get her attention. Her wrist is thin across the top but oddly deep, thick-seeming. Gately gets her to look at him and takes the hand off her wrist and uses it to mime writing awkwardly in the air, his eyes rolling a bit from the pain of it. This is his idea. He points at her and then out the window and circles his hand back to her. He refuses to grunt or moo to emphasize anything. His forefinger is twice the size of her thumb as he again mimes holding an implement and writing on the air. He makes such a big slow obvious show of it because he can’t see her eyes to be sure she gets what he’s after.
If a halfway-attractive female so much as smiles at Don Gately as they pass on the crowded street, Don Gately, like pretty much all heterosexual drug addicts, has within a couple blocks mentally wooed, shacked up with, married and had kids by that female, all in the future, all in his head, mentally dandling a young Gately on his mutton-joint knee while this mental Mrs. G. bustles in an apron she sometimes at night provocatively wears with nothing underneath. By the time he gets where he’s going, the drug addict has either mentally divorced the female and is in a bitter custody battle for the kids or is mentally happily still hooked up with her in his sunset years, sitting together amid big-headed grandkids on a special porch swing modified for Gately’s mass, her legs in support-hose and orthopedic shoes still damn fine, barely having to speak to converse, calling each other ‘Mother’ and ‘Papa,’ knowing they’ll kick within weeks of each other because neither could possibly live without the other, is how bonded they’ve got through the years.
The projective mental union of Gately and Joelle (‘M.P.’) van Dyne keeps foundering on the vision of Gately knee-dandling a kid in a huge blue- or pink-bordered veil, however. Or tenderly removing the spongy clamps of Joelle’s veil in moonlight on their honeymoon in Atlantic City and discovering just like one eye in the middle of her forehead or a horrific Churchill-face or something.[350] So the addictive mental long-range fantasy gets shaky, but he still can’t help envisioning the old X, with Joelle well-veiled and crying out And Lo! in that empty compelling way at the moment of orchasm — the closest Gately’d ever come to Xing a celebrity was the ragingly addicted nursing-student with the head-banging loft, who’d borne an incredible resemblance to the young Dean Martin. Having Joelle share personal historical snapshots with Gately leads his mind right over the second’s wall to envision Joelle, hopelessly smitten with the heroic Don G., volunteering to bonk the guy in the hat outside the room over the head and sneak Gately and his tube and catheter out of St. E.’s in a laundry cart or whatever, saving him from the BPD Finest or Federal crew cuts or whatever direr legal retribution the guy in the hat might represent, or else selflessly offering to give him her veil and a big dress and let him hold the catheter under the muumuu and sashay right out while she huddles under the covers in impersonation of Gately, romantically endangering her recovery and radio career and legal freedom, all out of a Liebestod-type consuming love for Gately.