Joelle's walk and U.H.I.D. (p. 224)
the figure a man in a wheelchair, in a coat and tie, his lap blanketed and no legs below, his well-fed face artistically reddened with some terrible joy, his smile’s arc of the extreme curvature that exists between mirth and fury, his ecstasy terrible to see, his head hairless and plastic and cast back, his eyes on the blue harlequin-patches of the post-storm sky, looking straight up, or having a seizure, or ecstatic, his arms also up and out in a gesture of submission or triumph or thanks, his oddly thick right hand the receptacle for the black spine of the case of some new film cartridge being advertised for distribution, the cartridge stuck like a tongue out of a slot in his (lineless) palm
Context
The anti-ad outside F.A.O. Schwartz: an unlabelled cartridge offered from the hand of a blanket-lapped, legless, wheelchaired figure whose face sits between mirth and fury — the Entertainment's semiotics and the A.F.R.'s iconography fused on one sidewalk easel, the day before I-Day. Joelle, the film's own star, removes the cartridge, looks, clicks it home, and walks on; Carlisle states flat what we hedge — it's presumably an ad for the very film she just remembered making, its one competent decoder walking past.