four separate occasions: the secret-user's ledger
Hal, having smoked cannabis on four separate occasions—twice w/ others—on this continental day of rest, plus still in a kind of guiltily sickening stomach-pit shock from the afternoon’s Eschaton debacle and his failure to intervene or even get up out of his patio-chair, Hal has lost a bit of his grip and has just gotten on the outside of his fourth chocolate cannoli in half an hour
Context
The secret habit rendered in its own bookkeeping voice. The sentence counts Hal's usings the way an addict counts — "four separate occasions—twice w/ others"—the parenthetical scrupulousness ("twice w/ others" the tell of how much matters about solitary vs. social use) marking a mind already tracking its consumption with an accountant's guilt. And the day's cannabis is braided with its symptoms: the paralytic failure to act at Eschaton, the compulsive fourth cannoli, the sugar funk. The theme's insight is the continuity of the compulsion — the pot, the sucrose, and the affective collapse are one dysregulated system, and the secret is kept even here, in the middle of a public gala. (The advertising/InterLace media history the reverie unspools — itself structured as an addiction of escalating potency and purchasable anxiety — is entertainment-self's / nationalism-onan's; routed.)