supper at the best table: the unearned divine gift, spliced onto a ruined face
Stice is one of those athletes whose body you know is an unearned divine gift because its conjunction with his face is so incongruous. [...] A beautiful sports body, lithe and tapered and sleekly muscled, smooth—like a Polycleitos body, Hermes or Theseus before his trials—on whose graceful neck sits the face of a ravaged Winston Churchill, broad and slab-featured, swart, fleshy, large-pored, with a mottled forehead under the crew cut’s V-shaped hairline, and eye-pouches, and jowls that hang and whenever he moves suddenly or lithely make a sort of meaty staccato sound like a wet dog shaking itself dry.
Context
The Stice-thread portrait, and the theme's clearest statement of the body as a thing given, not earned. You can read the gift right off him because it doesn't match its owner: a torso "like a Polycleitos body, Hermes or Theseus before his trials" carrying "the face of a ravaged Winston Churchill." The beauty is all below the neck, classical-statue stuff, while the face is a hick's slab of pouches and jowls that clap "like a wet dog shaking itself dry." Stice is a superhuman body with a human face bolted on wrong — which is exactly what makes him legible, later, as the wraith's chosen instrument: the instrument was never really his to begin with.