Page 168
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Back at the station, Michael watches Dandy laugh his way into custody and sees Murphy in a glass cage near the two girls, while his thoughts turn into a weary, sexualized, church-like meditation on battle, exhaustion, and performance.
The station becomes another stage and another chapel of degradation. Michael's voice is tired but still theatrical, caught between mocking the scene, desiring it, and recognizing that the day's battles have become repetitive ritual.
O'Dandy is led to the police car 'giggling like a madman saying eah, he he', and the narrator follows him in a long riff about being his clown before walking into the station, where Murphy sits 'in a glass cage' beside 'two eyelished girls' on 'wooden pews', and he mockingly offers to 'consercrate the sinners' before admitting, 'I am tired.'
The page turns arrest into carnival and then into mock liturgy, with the station treated as a church and the girls as 'Fading blossoms'. The narrator's loyalty to Dandy's madness is affectionate and self-mocking, and the coarse jokes about Murphy slide into exhaustion, so the performance runs down by the last line.