Joelle visits Gately: Abiding (pp. 856–857)
Some of the St. Columbkillers were saying it was the longest single blackout they’d ever heard of. This Wayne fellow’d said he had no idea when, why or how he’d ended up so far up north as metro Boston ten years after his last memory. […] The next thing this Wayne boy says he knows, he wakes up in the partially disconnected NNE pipe, one millennial decade older and with some ‘ “right nasty” ’ medical issues the timer’s bell prevents him from sharing in detail.
Context
The Kentucky newcomer, hatchet-scarred and pipe-dwelling, retold by Joelle from last night's meeting: he set off for the billiard establishment at maybe nineteen and woke up in an Allston drainage pipe a "millennial decade" later. The book's outer limit of forgetting — not a gap in a life but a life reduced to a gap. Dark twin of the Bird memory two pages on: the same Substance can erase a decade or, withdrawn from, dilate a single second. (The nested quote-marks with internal spaces are as the raw has them — Joelle quoting Wayne quoting himself.)