Page 31
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Gibbons remembers Martin Luther's theses after a long coma, while Beck disrupts the hospital on his way to Gibbons's room.
Beck threatens to fight him once he recovers. The narrator describes an experience beyond pain and sex, followed by Beck calling the Hydes to the hospital.
Gibbons comes 'out of the some months coma' remembering only 'the Martin Luther ninety five theses', while Beck, 'thirty five', curses his way past the nurses and the 'squide / bent up for a rush' to reach him and ask 'What's this mother fucken coma stuff!' The page turns to what Gibbons saw under: 'There was no God any longer. Just the / ever', and ends with Beck 'callen down the Hyde's' until 'the nurses knew that they would never marry a doctor / again.'
Profane hospital farce frames a stark account of the coma as an encounter with 'the ever', where 'No pain when your under' and life as he knew it 'was finished after that second.' Beck's loyalty is expressed as threat and bluster, and the comic escalation of summoning the Hydes undercuts the metaphysical middle. The prose runs in long unpunctuated turns, with source spellings such as 'hospitble', 'shuned' and 'shoked' giving it a rough spoken texture.