The bed that moves in the night: the Lyle consult and the three explanations

pivotal · 8 Nov YDAU

• When: 8 Nov YDAU (Stice consults Lyle in the weight room during Mario's movie)
• What: Stice goes to sleep with his bed against one wall and wakes with it against another. He first suspected roommate Coyle, then (after Coyle was infirmaried) Axford or Struck sneaking in; last night he barricaded the door with a can-topped chair and lined every sill with tennis-ball cans, and woke to find the bed jammed against the door and the cans stacked in a neat pyramid in the bed's former footprint. He brings the skull-planed torso and the problem to Lyle "cap in hand" — cap in hand doubly, since he comes contrite: he'd been one of the crackers about Lyle's diet and hairstyle, and last spring had Struck and Axford distract Lyle while he Krazy-Glued Lyle's left buttock's Spandex to the towel dispenser; now he "offers up the planes of his torso and forehead" in his own trademark black towel. The stakes as he feels them are explicit: the Staff say he's got "a quite legit shot at the Show" when he graduates, and he does not want the nights messing that up. He offers three explanations "in ascending order of grimness": (1) he is telekinetic, but only in his sleep; (2) someone else at E.T.A. is telekinetic and has it in for him; (3) he is a severe somnambulist. Lyle resolves nothing but counsels, over and over, not to underestimate objects. A note on the telling: the scene is narrated from Lyle's side, but the phenomena are Stice's own report; whether supernatural or somnambulistic is left explicitly open (as printed).