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. The ingenuity of the whole thing is beyond her. The Fun has long since dropped off the Too Much.
Context
One of the book's load-bearing passages: the cage whose exit is its bars, the EXIT sign over no exit, and the container/contained collapse — the cage has entered her. It's Kate's windowless room universalized, and the direct ancestor of the essay's "doorless cages" and of the map she'll try to eliminate at Notkin's party.