Gately, the wraith, and the figurants — "He tries to concentrate on all…"
He tries to concentrate on all this instead of remembering what Demerol’s warm rush of utter well-being felt like, remembering the comfortable sound of the clunk of his chin against his chest. Or instead of remembering any of his own interchanges with his mother’s live-in retired M.P. One of the highest prices of sobriety was not being able to keep from remembering things you didn’t want to remember, see for instance Ewell and the fraudulent-grandiosity thing from his wienieish childhood.
Context
Gately intubated and mute in the Trauma Wing, refusing narcotics: the theme's price-tag sentence — sobriety revokes the license to forget. Both directions of memory-management run in one breath: trying not to remember Demerol (the memory that could kill him; 169's do-not-Entertain protocol grows from here) and failing not to remember the M.P. (the memory sobriety forces on him).