Steeply's father and M*A*S*H (pp. 647–648)
Steeply was doing something to a toenail’s cracked polish. ‘Stuck. Fixed. Held. Trapped. As in trapped in some sort of middle. Between two things. Pulled apart in different directions.’
Context
The two operatives try to name the expression in the eyes of the consumed — the father's, and Hank Hoyne's, and by extension every casualty of the actual Entertainment — and reject the official phrase "empty of intent" as too flat for it. It isn't emptiness or petrification, Steeply insists; it's the opposite, a face "stuck," "held," "trapped in some sort of middle," pulled apart between cravings of great intensity. The refinement matters because it distinguishes the pleasure-death look from mere catatonia: the victim is not vacant but paralyzed by wanting, arrested at the exact instant of a desire too total to be acted on. That is the face the samizdat leaves behind.