Gately on live-in Staff and the Removal
over 60% of the inmates serving Life sentences in hellish MCI-Walpole and not disputing that they’d done what they’d done to get in there nevertheless had no memory of having done it, whatever got them in there. For Life. None. Gately had to have her run it by him a couple times before he isolated her point. They’d been in blackouts. Pat said a blackout was where you continued to function—sometimes disastrously—but weren’t aware later of what you did. It’s like your mind wasn’t in possession of your body, and it was usually brought on by alcohol but could also be brought on by chronic use of other Substances, synthetic narcotics among them. Gately said he couldn’t recall ever having a real blackout, and Pat M. got it but didn’t laugh.
Context
The book's formal definition of the blackout — functioning without memory, the mind out of possession of the body — plus the binder full of lifers serving Life for acts that no longer exist anywhere inside them. Gately's deadpan ("couldn't recall ever having a real blackout") is the theme folded into a joke: the faculty that would report its own absence is the absent faculty.