Gately's B.I.M. football decline (p. 904)
resulting in a kind of mnemonic brown-out where the entire two-year interval—the same interval during which the ex-M.P. found somebody else, a Newburyport divorcée who apparently put up a more sporting fight than Mrs. G., and decamped in his sticker-covered Ford with his seaman’s bag and pea-coat—the whole period’s become in Gately’s sober memory just the vague era of The Attack of the Killer Sidewalks.
Context
"Mnemonic brown-out": dimmed but not erased — the exact middle of the scale that runs from Hal's eidesis to Wayne's ten-year total blackout. And what's inside the brown-out, bracketed off in dashes like something the memory would rather route around: the M.P.'s decampment, the end of the mother's beatings. "In Gately's sober memory" stamps the whole retrospect as a recovery artifact.