Fackelmann's scam; the wraith returns (pp. 921–922)
and then now also that nobody seems to exactly be falling all over themself to bring the paper and pen it had sure seemed like Joelle van D. had understood Gately’s mimed request for, and that thus maybe Joelle’s visit and show-and-tell with the snapshots had been just as much a febrile hallucination as the figuranted wraith […] and that if Joelle v.D.’s intimate visit with the photo album was a hallucination that at least meant it was also a hallucination she was wearing fucking college-kid Ken Erdedy’s sweatpants
Context
The realization cascade turns on the archive itself: scene 166 — the whole photo-album visit the reader watched happen — is downgraded by its own rememberer to "maybe hallucination," on the evidence of a pen that never came. Fever has made Gately's recent memory formally undecidable, and he knows it; the book quietly declines to adjudicate. This is the memory/reality knot 177 ties shut.