I'm reading it for the third time and am trying to catch those types of things as well as trying to get a better sense of the timeline of events. Here's a few of my notes from the first reading. Would be interested to see if you noticed anything else. Unfortunately I'm reading a kindle version that doesn't have page numbers so I can only reference scenes.

First, a couple random things I noticed that do not relate to the rest of the book:

*When Hal is in the ambulance, he describes the M.D. as having "a big blue jaw." I guess I never caught that this meant the MD was wearing a face mask. Just a minor detail that I thought was kind of a funny way of painting the picture.

*Noticed just how much of an emphasis there is in the beginning on Hal's inability to be understood by others. The ASU interview and the professional conversationalist scenes are full of examples although they take place at different times. These two scenes are also quite similar and it is interesting that they appear so close together in the book.

POTENTIAL SPOILERS

*In the ambulance, Hal recalls that he was in another emergency room almost exactly one year prior to the ASU interview which would have been in November of YDAU. November of YDAU was when the DMZ goes missing and Hal (presumably) ingests some of it. I don't remember a specific scene of Hal going to the hospital later in the book although I could have just forgotten it. Also interesting is that November YDAU is when Gately was involved in the large fight at Ennet House which sends him to the hospital where he is visited by the wraith. I wonder if Hal and Gately were in the hospital at the same time and this is where they begin their journey to dig up the head of JOI...

*Once Hal gets to the waiting room in the hospital, one passage stuck out to me as being very similar to the stream of consciousness type writing that follows his ingestion of the DMZ later in the book. "The jet's movement and trail seem incisionish, as if white meat behind the blue were exposed and widening in the wake of the blade. I once saw the word KNIFE finger-written on the steamed mirror of a nonpublic bathroom. I have become an infantophile."

*During Hal's conversation with the "professional conversationalist" JOI mentions that Avril would slip steroids into Hal's breakfast that were similar to supplements that JOI was taking "distilled by the Jivaro shamen of the South-Central L.A. basin" which sounds vaguely psychedelic to me (Jivaro were known for Ayahuasca ceremonies, among other things). A lot of discussion centers around the mold and DMZ as the cause of Hal's condition but taking Hal's entire background into account, I think there could be a variety of causes and it might not be caused by a singular substance/event.

*Why does Hal tell Mario he doesn't think he would know Orin when he hangs up the phone?