Fackelmann's scam; the wraith returns (pp. 932–933)
It bothered Gately that he could empathize with Fackelmann’s desire to hide and blot out, but in the retrospect of memory now it bothers him more that he didn’t lie there up next to the comatose girl being bothered for more than a few minutes before he felt the familiar desire that blots out all bother […] Gately did, he remembers vividly, he let Fackelmann fix them both up but good, and told himself he was doing it to keep Fackelmann company, like sitting up with a sick friend, and (maybe worst) believed it was true.
Context
What Abiding-by-memory actually costs: the memory Gately uses instead of Demerol arrives with its moral invoice attached. "In the retrospect of memory now" the ranking of what bothers him has changed — memory as ongoing audit, revising the past's meaning from sobriety — and what it insists on, "vividly," is his own self-deception at the moment of relapse. The Substances existed to blot out; sober remembering is the un-blotting, and he takes it like medicine.