Gately, the wraith, and the figurants (p. 842)
What Gately remembers, in pain, bubbling just under the lid of sleep, is the special and precise way the M.P. would handle the flies that came into the kitchen. […] The conversation with the M.P. that Gately reexperiences in minutely dreamed detail was the M.P., at about five Heinekens, explaining that maiming a fly was way more effective than killing a fly, for flies.
Context
The memory/dream boundary dissolving in real time: the fly-maiming material is introduced as remembering "just under the lid of sleep," then quietly reclassified as "reexperience[d] in minutely dreamed detail" — sobriety's unbidden memory arriving in dream form, the exact mechanism Ewell named at p. 814. The maimed-fly content itself is mined under addiction/cruelty; what belongs to this theme is the "minutely dreamed" frame — and the nasty fictional dream it bleeds into (p. 843, in the spine).