Gately's B.I.M. football decline (p. 906)
And but then, without the only other thing he’d been devoted to, the psychic emergency-brake was off, and Gately’s sixteenth year is still mostly a gray blank, except for his mother’s new red chintz TV-watching couch, and also the acquaintance of an accommodating Rite-Aid pharmacist’s assistant with disfiguring eczema and serious gambling debts. Plus memories of terrible rear-ocular itching and of a basic diet of convenience-store crud, plus the vegetables from his mother’s vodka glass, while she slept.
Context
The year out of school, remembered as almost nothing: a gray blank with three or four surviving objects. The inventory form is the point — when the Substances take over completely, memory stops keeping narrative and keeps only debris. The present tense "is still mostly a gray blank" makes it a standing condition of the man in the hospital bed.