the blackout study: sixty percent who can't remember
over 60% of the inmates serving Life sentences in hellish MCI-Walpole and not disputing that they’d done what they’d done to get in there nevertheless had no memory of having done it, whatever got them in there. For Life. None.
Context
The datum Pat uses to define the Disease's core horror to Gately: the blackout, in which "you continued to function—sometimes disastrously—but weren’t aware later of what you did." That a majority of Walpole lifers cannot remember the acts that imprisoned them for life makes the theme's point about the substance-cage with statistical brutality — the Disease can author a murder while the self is absent, the mind "not in possession of the body." Gately's deadpan claim that he "couldn't recall ever having a real blackout" is the joke sitting on top of the terror: the blackout is precisely the thing you can't remember having.