The Stice counterphobia session, overheard through the door — Rusk's one extended appearance

pivotal · Late P.M., Monday 9 Nov YDAU (session); standing weights-exemption behind it

• When: late P.M. (~2100h, Study Period), Monday 9 Nov YDAU; the underlying "work together on your fear of weights" and the weights exemption are standing (Stice's pull-down trauma was at fourteen)
• What: The only sustained Rusk performance in the novel, and we get it eavesdropped: Pemulis, crossing the dark Comm.-Ad. lobby, finds that "Ortho Stice seemed to be in there in Dr. Dolores Rusk’s office, interfacing with Dr. Rusk well after regular hours," and pauses at the door. What comes through the wood is her practice verbatim at last — a cascade of analytic jargon diagnosing Stice with counterphobia: "your presenting maladjustment, Ortho, like many males and athletes, is that you’re suffering from counterphobia," with "projective infantile omnipotence," pre-Oedipal object-cathexis, GI Joe as "the potent but antagonistic father" and Barbie as "the most obviously reductive and phallocentric reduction of the mother to an archetype of sexual function and availability" — against which The Darkness's flat Kansas twang keeps asking what any of it has to do with linoleum ("Fear of linoleum?"; "I don’t play with no goddamn Action-Figurines."). The session's occasion is real and, in the book's terms, possibly genuinely uncanny — Stice's voice cracks "as he said something about his bed" (the moving-furniture business) — and her instrument for it is the parody-therapeutic: "Rusk was urging Stice to name his anger and Stice was proposing to name his anger Horace after his old man’s late pointer." The door itself carries her whole standing portrait in objects: the "nonconducting rubberized sheath on the knob" (event 4's residue), her "name and degrees and title," and "a needlepoint sampler with a little heart inside a big heart and a cursive exhortation to Champion An Inner Child Today, which the little kids at E.T.A. find puzzling and upsetting." Her prior clinical file on Stice is fixed two days later in narration: "Dr. Dolores Rusk has authorized his exemption from all but very basic weights, pending resolution of his fear of weights." [Page pins for 108 cited as span — the source text's inline markers are flagged unreliable; see Dating notes.]