Hal frees Stice from the frozen window; recalls JOI's end-stage hallucinations (incl. not hearing Hal speak)

texture · 20 Nov YDAU, ~0456h

• When: 20 Nov YDAU, ~0456h
• What: Doing his pre-dawn ablutions ("For the past ten days I'd always felt worst in the early A.M., before dawn"), Hal finds Ortho Stice with his sweat-dampened forehead frozen stuck to a hall window (stuck ~4 hours, too embarrassed to call out). Hal tries to yank him free, producing a grotesque skin-stretch that momentarily reveals Stice's "real"/thin second face, then fetches janitors Kenkle and Brandt for hot water. In their exchange about the paranormal, Hal recalls his father: Himself "allegedly used to see his father's ghost on stairways," and toward the end saw black-widow spiders in his hair and "claimed I wasn't speaking sometimes when I was sitting right there speaking to him" — a load-bearing cross-reference to the novel's frame (JOI's/others' inability to perceive Hal's speech).