Gately and Sorkin's Twin Towers (p. 915)
Gately lay in the Trauma Ward in terrific infected pain, trying to Abide between cravings for relief by remembering a blinding white afternoon just after Xmas, when Fackelmann and Kite were off disposing of some of a furnished apartment’s furnishings and Gately was killing time in the apartment laminating some false MA drivers licenses
Context
The frame sentence that carries the whole Sorkin/Twin Towers flashback: five-plus pages of criminal apprenticeship, Fackelmann, Dilaudid economics, and the Forsythia Bowl all hang off this one clause — remembering as Abiding technology, memory deployed to get from one craving to the next. The scene's double time-idiom is its own little joke: ward-Gately Abiding through unendurable time by recalling an afternoon spent "killing time."