Stice comes to Lyle: the haunting registers as a body-management problem
the reason he’s here is this A.M. he wakes up with his bed moved over against the chair by the door at an angle he didn’t care for one bit and with all the ball-cans arranged in a neat pyramid in the dusty rectangle where his bed was supposed to normally be.
Context
Stice brings the moved bed to Lyle the way he'd bring a spasming muscle: as a fact about his sleeping body that's fouling his function. He'd barricaded the door with a chair and stacked "empty tennis-ball cans" as an alarm, and still woke with the bed shoved across the room and the cans re-stacked in a pyramid. The uncanny event arrives, characteristically, through tennis objects — ball-cans as tripwire — and is presented not as a ghost story but as something wrong with the body that has to keep performing. (The wraith-reality substance is ghosts-wraiths'; landed here is the event as a threat to Stice's regimen.)