The ceiling-bed morning: Coyle's breaking point

pivotal · 20 Nov YDAU, ~0100h-mid-morning

• When: 20 November YDAU — from the ~0100h discharge flare through the blizzard mid-morning in Hal and Mario's room
• What: Just after 0100h Coyle has his discharges again; unbothered, he doesn't even hit the light — fresh sheet from the stack, back to sleep — while the sleepless Stice ends up at a hallway window his sweated forehead freezes to. Later in the night Coyle wakes to find Stice missing and Stice's bed missing too; he turns on the light and sees the bed frame up near the ceiling — "presumably bolted," as he insists on phrasing it, "the only rationale that's possible is bolts." By morning Stice — some of his face torn off, per Coyle's account, when Troeltsch pulled him off the window, the rips mummified in a whole roll of toilet paper — has locked himself in their room, and Coyle (no key since the accident with the whirlpool) can't even get his apnea-guard-cleaning supplies. Still wearing the mouthguard, oddly traumatized, trembling like something hanging from the tip of a pipette, he shelters in Hal and Mario's room during Himself's Accomplice!, relays Stice's sworn-secret theory of a guardian ghost residing in ordinary objects, and declares the straw: he's going to Lateral Alice for a room switch, like Troeltsch did. Then, immediately, the worry — should he tell Schtitt, or Rusk? "What if they haul him off somewhere, and it's my fault?" The scene is also the book's one full-name stamp: Kyle Dempsy Coyle, whom Hal greets as "K.D.C."