Joelle's last walk — "What looks like the cage's exit…"
What looks like the cage's exit is actually the bars of the cage. The afternoon's meshes. The entrance says EXIT. There isn't an exit. The ultimate annular fusion: that of exhibit and its cage. Jim's own Cage III: Free Show. It is the cage that has entered her, somehow.
Context
7 Nov YDAU, Joelle on Boylston Street, walking to the party where she means to kill herself. This is the theme's center of gravity: "annular fusion" lifted clean out of the physics and made the figure for addiction — exhibit and cage fused into one ring, the exit revealed as bars. Everything else in this collection orbits this passage. (Confirmed against the print edition: p. 222 runs "white face below" → "Revolving and yet".)