Gately's fever-memories, the buried-head dream (pp. 933–934)
He dreams he’s with a very sad kid and they’re in a graveyard digging some dead guy’s head up and it’s really important, like Continental-Emergency important […] the important thing was buried in the guy’s head […] but the kid moves his mouth but nothing comes out […] the sad kid holds something terrible up by the hair and makes the face of somebody shouting in panic: Too Late.
Context
The samizdat's endgame arrives as a fever-dream, and it's the whole plot compressed into a graveyard. Gately dreams he and "a very sad kid" (Hal, mouth moving with nothing coming out — the figurant son) are exhuming a dead man's head because "the important thing was buried in the guy's head," a thing of "Continental-Emergency" stakes, while Gately is too "irresistibly hungry," too busy eating from economy-size bags of corporate snacks, to dig — the appetite literally preventing the rescue. This is the Master cartridge as the book has been circling it: buried with JOI's head (178 confirms the annulation-zone), the key to a continental catastrophe, and the two figures who might reach it are one mute and one devouring. The dream stages the theme's terminal irony — the thing that could save everyone is buried in the dead entertainer, and the digger is too hungry to dig.