IJ study archive

Scene 167: stice stuck to window

Scene
167
Pages
864–876
When
20 Nov YDAU (2009), ~0456h, pre-dawn of the great blizzard — but the hall's digital display reads '11–18-EST0456' (p. 865) — an inconsistency in the text itself; 20 Nov holds (Wayne's Tue 17 Nov broadcast and Wednesday's run are already past per p. 900)
Where
E.T.A. subdorm hallways (boys' room, hall window by Axford's single; stairwell; second-floor east hall), Enfield MAin: E.T.A. (Enfield Tennis Academy) › E.T.A. subdormitories
POV
Hal Incandenza (1st person)

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Open questions this scene bears on

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 11)

Summary

Up before 0500 on the morning a freak November blizzard buries Boston, Hal (ten days off marijuana, feeling worst before dawn) finds Ortho Stice sitting barefoot at a hall window with his sweaty forehead frozen fast to the glass, where he's been stuck since ~0100, too embarrassed to call out. Stice tells a flat statisticians-duck-hunting joke, asks Hal whether he believes in "parabnormal shit," mentions that something stood behind him an hour ago and that he's told only Lyle about the boggling things happening to him; Hal's yank only stretches Stice's loose facial flesh into a half-meter shelf, revealing a small, fine-featured "second face" before he eases it back. Troeltsch — inexplicably overnighting in Axford's single, a fact the universe seems aligned to keep unmentionable — emerges doing Eyewitness News into his fist, and Hal goes downstairs for the janitors Kenkle and Brandt (broken low-temperature-physics Ph.D. and grinning submoronic mop-man, hired by Himself after an Orange Line rescue). Kenkle stops mid-errand to report that Hal's face is "working hilariously" — openly cachinnated — though Hal feels nothing of the kind; after Stice's off-page scream of "GYAAAAAAA," Hal tries to read his own expression in the east window and finds himself "sketchy and faint… tentative and ghostly against all that blazing white."

What to notice

The uncanny arrives at breakfast-hour, and comedy is the delivery vehicle: a boy frozen by the forehead to a window swaps flat jokes with his rescuer, and the scene lets you laugh right up until you count what's actually in it — the something that stood behind Stice an hour ago, the solitary figure sitting in the bleachers "getting buried by snow, just sitting there", the run of moving objects he's told only Lyle about. Notice Hal's hedge when asked point-blank about ghosts — subhadronic particles "behave ghostishly", "I think I withhold all prejudgment" — the book's own evidentiary posture put in its most skeptical mouth. The body-horror is doing theme-work: the yank that stretches Stice's flesh into a shelf reveals a small "second face" under the visor of skin, "aflame with some sort of revelation" — the hidden self physically surfacing. And the scene quietly rehearses the novel's opening catastrophe: Kenkle reports that Hal's face is "working hilariously", openly cachinnated, while Hal feels nothing at all — expression decoupled from interior, with no mirror available to check. The closing image completes it: Hal to himself in the blazing east window, "sketchy and faint", "tentative and ghostly" — the living boy fainter than the hauntings. Ambient detail worth catching: pre-dawn weeping behind the doors, treated as routine conditioning.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 864: pre-dawn hall walk with toothbrush and NASA glass; curved cornerless subdorm halls; "faint sounds of early-morning weeping in certain rooms" — top players start the A.M. with a quick fit of crying.
  • pp. 864-865: open window and snow-hump in the boys' room; head out into the blizzard; the imagined tableau of C.T. brainstorming "toward a state of Total Worry" over the stranded Québec junior squad.
  • p. 865: the ceiling display reads 11–18-EST0456; Stice discovered in a chair facing the hall window, forehead against the glass, in black Darknesswear, talking or chanting; he identifies Hal without turning.
  • pp. 865-866: 'Shoot, are you crying?' — Hal's voice had been neutral; Hal makes grotesque faces behind Stice's back, which make him feel worse; ten days of feeling worst before dawn.
  • pp. 866-867: blizzard logistics for Fundraiser day's exhibition against the snowed-in Québec junior squad ("Don't wake him up on Fundraiser day yet"; the Tucson WhataBurger is a separate, later meet); the opening for a C.T. impression that Stice, uncharacteristically, doesn't take.
  • p. 867: the statisticians duck-hunting joke, told to the glass — one shoots low, one high, the third whoops "We got him, boys, we done got him!"; neither laughs; weepers keening behind doors.
  • pp. 867-868: the long window survey: a solitary figure sitting in the bleachers behind the east Show Courts, "getting buried by snow, just sitting there," age and sex indeterminable; buried cars like igloos; "the whole scene had an indescribable pathos to it."
  • p. 868: Hal finally asks why the forehead's against the glass; "The forehead stopped feeling cold a couple hours back, when I lost all my feeling in it" — stuck ~four hours.
  • pp. 868-869: Stice's account — woken by Coyle's nocturnal "discharges," jittery ("Something's real wrong, I can tell"), sat down to watch the snow, rested a sweated forehead on the glass: "Whammo. Kertwanged my own self"; tried pulling at 0230 and heard the skin-vs-bind sound; cf. Ingersoll's tongue on the net-post (Rader's prank).
  • pp. 869-870: who he prayed wouldn't find him (Pemulis, Freer); Troeltsch snoring behind Axford's door; Hal, horrified, admires "The Darkness's ballsy calm"; the bad half-hour his lip froze to his own breath.
  • pp. 870-871: 'You believe in shit, Hal?… Telekiniption. Ghosts. Parabnormal shit'; "Somebody did come by before… Then he went away. Or… it"; Hal: Himself allegedly saw his father's ghost on stairways, but also saw black-widow spiders in his hair and claimed Hal wasn't speaking when he was; Mario's sightings; "Subhadronic particles behave ghostishly. I think I withhold all prejudgment."
  • p. 871: Stice offers to show Hal "parabnormal shit that'll shake your personal tree" — he's told nobody but Lyle and is "sick of the secretness of it"; Hal pulls on Two: the flesh stretches into a half-meter shelf and a "narrow, fine-featured, and slightly rodential" second face appears, "aflame with some sort of revelation."
  • pp. 871-872: 'Put it back put it back put it back!'; Hal eases him forward; decollagenated forehead-flap at eyelash level; verdict: thaw it off.
  • pp. 872-873: Troeltsch's cowlick and fist emerge from Axford's single — "Reports of screaming have reached us here in the Eyewitness News-Center"; the tacit agreement not even to acknowledge the room question; Hal takes his toothbrush and NASA glass off the vent (since the Betel Caper, n.352, no naïf leaves a toothbrush unattended), leaves the glass in Troeltsch's keeping, and goes for help.
  • pp. 873-874: the Kenkle and Brandt dossier — Brandt's S.-B. I.Q. "Submoronic-to-Moronic," affective range of grins; Kenkle's U.Mass low-temp physics doctorate at 21, O.N.R. court-martial, breakage, Ba'hai texts and spectacular phlegm; custodial technique of pinpoint spit-globs marking Brandt's next mop target; earplugs because "people's nightmare-cries gave them the fantods."
  • p. 874: how Himself met them on the T (n.353), was carried up the hill in Brandt's fireman's carry, cast them as black-veiled Noh attendants in the Zero-Gravity Tea Ceremony, and got them hired — graveyard shift only, since Mr. Harde loathes Kenkle.
  • pp. 874-875: Kenkle's nonstop discourse — Christmas presents as "the childish co-eval of venereal interface"; the missionary-man anti-hunching riff.
  • pp. 875-876: 'Good prince Hal'; Hal relays the emergency; Kenkle: "why the hilarity?… Your face is a hilarity-face. It's working hilariously… openly cach-inated" — while Hal feels nothing; even composed "deadly-somber" he reads as "Mirth-ful, perhaps."
  • p. 876: Stice's ceiling-rattling 'GYAAAAAAA'; Brandt running with the steaming bucket; "I elect to go with mirthful"; Hal tries to make out his own expression in the east window — too light: "I looked sketchy and faint to myself, tentative and ghostly against all that blazing white."

Themes in this scene

  • Ghosts and Wraiths: the scene is thick with the wraith's traffic — Stice's run of "parabnormal shit," the something that stood behind him and went away, the unmoving figure being buried in the bleachers, Himself's own father-ghost sightings, and Hal's closing self-image as "ghostly" in the glass.
  • Communication and Solipsism: Hal's inside/outside split goes clinical — his neutral voice sounds like crying to Stice, and his face broadcasts open hilarity he neither feels nor can control or even see (the breath-fogged window denies both men reflections); direct ancestor of scene 001's monstrous interview.
  • The Body and Tennis: the player's body literally fused to the architecture — skin vs. occlusive seal, the "second face" under Stice's prairie flesh aflame with revelation; plateaux talk and pre-WhataBurger nerves Hal misdiagnoses from his own experience.
  • Depression and Anhedonia: dorms full of pre-dawn weeping treated as routine conditioning; Hal's "I could use a quality laugh right now" and elementally horrific early mornings are the withdrawal-anhedonia that scene 170 will name.
  • Family and Hamlet: Himself's father's ghost on stairways and the dead king's question of whether apparitions are real or symptom ("we kind of wrote it all off"); Kenkle's "Good prince Hal" crowns the Shakespearean princeling reading of Hal.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • Ingersoll's tongue / Rader's prank (p. 869) — Big Buddy cast from scenes 036ff; Coyle's discharges continue the Coyle urine-troubles thread — the infirmary "suspicious discharge" (p. 394, scene 084) and "he of the weak bladder and suspicious discharge" excused to pee mid-drill (p. 454, scene 094).
  • The Zero-Gravity Tea Ceremony and Kenkle/Brandt's hiring (p. 874, n.353) — JOI filmography apparatus; see scene n024.
  • Ennet House residents staffing the portcullis security booth (p. 868) — the E.T.A./Ennet House membrane that the novel keeps almost-but-never merging (Gately a few hundred meters downhill in St. E.'s).
  • n.352 (Betel Caper): Jan-Feb YDAU toothbrush-coatings with betel-nut extract, six E.T.A.s sent to Dr. Zegarelli, perpetrator and point still unknown — institutional paranoia ambient at E.T.A.; Zegarelli per the archive's catalog (pp. 509 and 526, scene 102).
  • n.353: the Orange Line "runs not to Enfield-Brighton but to Roxbury and Mattapan" — very bad joss for the white and incapacitated; Himself drunk and lost on the wrong line.

Forward

  • Continuous with scene 170 (pp. 896-902): Hal leaves to return "to see about Stice's defenestration" and is ambushed by the panic attack; the GYAAAAA and "scuffles and thumps from upstairs" recur there as the brooha Kahn reports.
  • Stice's secret poltergeist phenomena (told only to Lyle) — the moving bed and furniture thread that culminates in his bed found bolted to the ceiling, reported secondhand in Hal's talk with Mario and Coyle ("The Darkness thinks ghosts," pp. 942-943, scene 179 — Stice himself never reappears in dialogue); the wraith (digested with the Gately hospital scenes, 166ff) is the implied mover, and the figure in the snow-bleachers and the visitor "about maybe an hour back" read as its perimeter.
  • Hal's face-control collapse: bridges the deLint-charted affectless Hal of the Stice exhibition match (scenes 125/127, pp. 651-662 — "deLint's chart would show") and the scene 001 catastrophe ("I am in here" vs. what the outside sees); the window-mirror inspection repeats at p. 876 and again in scene 170's plan to "examine my expression in the mirror for unintentional hilarity" (p. 896).
  • Troeltsch in Axford's room (pp. 870, 872): the unbroachable-possibilities paragraph is this scene's quiet bombshell; Troeltsch's broadcast ambitions tie to the WETA slot Wayne wrecked on the 17th (see scene n332; described narratively in scene 170, pp. 899-900).

Notable passages (6)
  • p. 866: "There's something elementally horrific about waking before dawn" — Hal's withdrawal mornings; anchor passage for depression-anhedonia.
  • pp. 867-868: the bleacher figure "getting buried by snow, just sitting there… The whole scene had an indescribable pathos to it" — the unexplained watcher; ghosts-wraiths anchor.
  • p. 870: "You believe in shit, Hal?… Telekiniption. Ghosts. Parabnormal shit." — the paranormal thread surfacing in dialect.
  • p. 871: "a narrow, fine-featured, and slightly rodential face, aflame with some sort of revelation, looked out at the window from beneath the pink visor of stretched spare skin" — Stice's second face; the body's hidden self made visible.
  • pp. 875-876: "Your face is a hilarity-face. It's working hilariously… You are almost doubled over." — Hal's expression decoupled from his interior; essential pre-figuration of scene 001.
  • p. 876: "I looked sketchy and faint to myself, tentative and ghostly against all that blazing white." — Hal as ghost in his own mirror; closing image.

What links here Timeline events here (23) · Connected from (9) · Passages quoted here (43) · Motifs (6)

Timeline events here

Connected from

Passages quoted here

Motifs