Young Jim, his father, and the mattress — "I remember I was eating lunch…"
I remember I was eating lunch and reading something dull by Bazin when my father came into the kitchen and made himself a tomato juice beverage and said that as soon as I was finished he and my mother needed my help in their bedroom.
Context
The scene's first two words are the theme — "I remember" — and then the source-note (n.208's text, second quote) reveals what kind of remembering this is: a chapter in a published anthology of fusion pioneers' "Spontaneous Reminiscences," written some forty years after the fact, copyrighted. The only sustained first-person JOI in the novel is an adult act of remembering the father, on paper, for money — memory as document in the fullest sense. Every "I remember" that follows is a published sentence.