Pages 394–395

1. The evidence is built to eliminate every suspect. Coyle's been in the infirmary two nights — bed still moves. Door jammed with a chair, ball-cans stacked on it and lined on all three sills against meal-card dickying — and this morning the bed is against the chair "at an angle he didn't care for one bit," the cans re-stacked "in a neat pyramid in the dusty rectangle where his bed was supposed to normally be" (p. 394). Stice's three explanations come "in ascending order of grimness," and all three locate the cause in a person — Stice asleep, or some other E.T.A. kid — never in the room itself; the word any reader supplies by now is one a kid with "a quite legit shot at the Show" can't afford to say.

2. Watch Lyle's posture change. With Chu and Blott and the mosquito-whine girl he shrugged and dispensed Remarks; here he "is completely engaged" (p. 395), waves the whole cap-in-hand apology away "like a gnat," and repeats his keynote: "Do not underestimate objects." His "The world, after all, which is radically old, is made up mostly of objects" upgrades the stock Remark of p. 388 ("The world is very old") into an actual claim. The guru treats this consult as different in kind — that's your calibration for how seriously to take the bed.

3. The parable is offered as an answer, not a dodge. The man who bets he can stand 100% on a chair and lift it; the crowd's side-bets; the dying oncologist moaning at God about the chair-man's "idiotic picayune power"; the jump down, change spraying, "leaving behind a dumbfounded crowd still staring up at an object he had not underestimated" (p. 395). Lyle never interprets it and neither does the narrator. It's the only consultation tonight answered with a story; the work of applying it to a self-moving bed is left entirely to Stice — and to you.