Hal eats the mold — "O. says his memory diverges at…"
O. says his memory diverges at this point, probably as a result of anxiety. In his first memory, the Moms’s path around the yard is a broad circle of hysteria: ‘God!’ she calls out. ‘Help! My son ate this!’ she yells in Orin’s second and more fleshed-out recollection, yelling it over and over, holding the speckled patch aloft in a pincer of fingers, running around and around the garden’s rectangle while O. gaped at his first real sight of adult hysteria. […] her turns, inside the ideogram of string, crisp and martial, crying ‘My son ate this! Help!’ and lapping me twice before the memory recedes.
Context
The forking memory, dramatized on the page: Orin's recollection splits into two versions at the moment of maximum anxiety and the narration simply runs both, etiology supplied ("probably as a result of anxiety") and an ending that treats memory as a medium with edges — it "recedes." The novel's first full demonstration that a memory is a made thing with variants, not a recording.