the supine morning: is the buckling raising his game? — "What if it’s the mental buckling…"

Hal cuts straight to the live question buried in Stice's unraveling. Coyle and Mario bring a horror story — the bed bolted to the ceiling, Stice mummified in toilet tissue, "mentally buckling" — and Hal's response is a tennis assessment: the kid's game is up this fall. Then the crux, stated as a genuine puzzle: This is the wraith-Stice scaffold in raw form — whether the thing wrecking Stice and the thing sharpening his tennis are the same thing, and whether a game raised by breakdown still counts as the player's. (The ghost-in-objects explanation Stice gives — chosen by a guardian that manifests in objects to teach him "not [to] underestimate ordinary objects" — is ghosts-wraiths'; landed here is the game-level datum, the form-vs-inspiration question the Stice-wraith crux turns on.)