Hal in V.R. 6 (Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat) (pp. 686–687)
He watches The American Century as Seen Through a Brick and Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell and then part of Valuable Coupon Has Been Removed, which is maddening because it’s all a monologue from some bespectacled little contemporary of Miles Penn and Heath Pearson who was almost as ubiquitous as Reat and Bain in Himself’s work but whose name right now Hal can’t for the life of him recall.
Context
Evening of 11 November, three days into secretly quitting: Hal holes up alone with his dead father's cartridges and a ubiquitous child actor's name simply won't come. First onset of memory failure as withdrawal symptom (n.279, at the spine's end, supplies the etiology; the name surfaces three scenes later — "Out of nowhere Hal remembers: Smothergill," p. 714). Also the first firing of the book's house recall-block idiom, "can't for the life of him" — watch it recur at pp. 746, 843, and 850.