Pages 864–876
Still the blizzard pre-dawn of 20 November, ~0456h, Hal narrating in first person. Walking E.T.A.'s curved subdorm halls with his toothbrush, past doors leaking "early-morning weeping" (routine here, treated as conditioning), Hal finds Ortho Stice sitting barefoot in the dark with his forehead frozen fast to the hall window — stuck since about one A.M., too embarrassed to yell. Also afoot: Jim Troeltsch, inexplicably emerging from Axford's single doing Eyewitness News into his fist (why he's in that room goes cosmically unasked), and, downstairs, the graveyard-shift janitors Kenkle and Brandt, who get their full introduction here.
Terms, in order of appearance
- the Betel Caper (p. 873) — endnote 352: last winter's toothbrush-tampering spree, still unsolved; why no one leaves a brush unattended.
- S.-B. (p. 873) — the real Stanford-Binet I.Q. test; Brandt's file reads "Submoronic-to-Moronic."
- Ba'hai (p. 873) — the real Bahá'í faith, part of Kenkle's reading.
- the Orange Line (p. 874) — real Boston T line; endnote 353 explains why it was "very bad joss" for a drunk, lost Himself.
- Noh (p. 874) — real Japanese theater; its black-clad onstage attendants are the parts Himself cast the janitors in, in his Zero-Gravity Tea Ceremony.
- cachinnated (p. 875) — real word: laughed loudly; Kenkle's "openly cach-inated."
- "Good prince Hal" (p. 875) — Kenkle's greeting; Prince Hal is Shakespeare's wayward heir in Henry IV.
After you read: three things
1. Stice wants to talk about "parabnormal shit." Before the rescue attempt, he asks Hal straight: "You believe in shit, Hal?... Telekiniption. Ghosts. Parabnormal shit." Something stood behind him an hour ago and went away; he's told only Lyle and is "sick of the secretness of it." You've had one prior datum — the mealtime claim that "Stice's bed moves around" and his too-hot denial (p. 632). Add the unexplained figure he and Hal watch through the glass, sitting in the east bleachers "getting buried by snow, just sitting there," and the scene is quietly thick with visitation. Hal withholds judgment; "Subhadronic particles behave ghostishly."
2. Hal's inside and outside are coming uncoupled. Stice, hearing Hal's studiedly neutral voice, asks if he's crying. Later Kenkle reports that Hal's face "is a hilarity-face. It's working hilariously" — open laughter Hal neither feels nor intends; even composed "deadly-somber" he reads as mirthful. If that gap feels familiar, it should: the novel opened with an extreme version of it, in the Year of Glad interview room (pp. 3–17). The scene ends with Hal seeking his own reflection and finding himself "sketchy and faint... tentative and ghostly against all that blazing white."
3. The janitors carry a piece of Himself. Kenkle and Brandt — low-temperature-physics Ph.D. gone to breakage and phlegm, plus a grinning mop-man steered by pinpoint spit-globs — were rescued off the Orange Line by a drunk, lost Himself (endnote 353), carried him up the hill, got cast as veiled Noh attendants in one of his films, and have been menially employed ever since. The book keeps handing you the dead father through exactly this kind of side door; Kenkle's "Good prince Hal" is the scene tipping its Shakespeare.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.