Hal in V.R. 6 (Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat)
Hal tortures himself by imagining swarthy leering types threatening to torture various loved ones if Hal can’t come up with the name of the kid in Valuable Coupon and Low-Temperature Civics and Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat.
Context
The block turned into a game of self-torture: Hal raises the imaginary stakes on his own memory to force the retrieval, and it still doesn't work. For the boy who tested Beyond Eidetic, a name that won't come is a genuine emergency — withdrawal cognition rendered as melodrama.