Gately, the wraith, and the figurants (pp. 827–828)
It might be a whole different night. […] As with Ewell, when Gately comes up out of sleep there’s no way to tell how long Day’s been there, or quite why.
Context
Geoffrey Day is at the bedside eating a free cream-cheese brownie, and the narration quietly concedes it can't date its own scene: mute, feverish, intubated Gately surfaces and submerges with no way to index the visits against a calendar. Hospital time as experienced from inside the trauma — the scene's whole temporal register (which visitor, which night, how long) is set to "unknown" in its first paragraph, loading the how-long-have-I-been-here realization that lands nine pages later (p. 836, in the spine).