Hal, Accomplice!, the blizzard, Weston memories (pp. 943–944)
‘Stice is mentally buckling,’ Coyle said […] ‘He keeps staring at things with his temple-veins flexing, trying to exert will on them. He bet me 20 beans he could stand on his desk chair and lift it up at the same time, and then he wouldn’t let me cancel the bet when I got embarrassed for him after half an hour, standing up there flexing his temples.’ […] ‘What if it’s the mental buckling that’s raised his game?’ Coyle said. ‘Does it still count as buckling?’
Context
Stice still misreads the haunting as his own nascent psychic muscle, and the community still files it under psychiatric vocabulary — "buckling," Rusk's counterphobia territory. The chair-lift bet even echoes Lyle's koan about the bed; Coyle's closing question — if the buckling raised his game, does it still count as buckling? — is the institutional-psychology-vs.-actual-haunting standoff in one line.