Joelle's walk and the U.H.I.D. card
As she remembers things Jim was, besides a great filmic mind and her true heart’s friend, the world’s best hailer of Boston cabs, known to have less hailed than conjured cabs in spots where Boston cabs by all that’s right just aren’t, a hailer of Boston cabs in places like Veedersburg, Indiana and Powell, Wyoming, something in the authority of the lifted arm’s height, the oncoming taxi undergoing a sort of parallax as it bore down over tumbleweed streets, appearing under Incandenza’s upraised palm as if awaiting benediction. He was a tall and physically slow-moving man with a great love of taxis. And they loved him back. Never again a cab in four-plus years, after that.
Context
The heart of the Jim memory suite, flagged as memory by its own opening clause — "As she remembers things" — the book's tenderest remembering of JOI, built not from the filmography but from a private absurdity. Then the memorial discipline: "Never again a cab in four-plus years" — the memory converted into observance, mourning practiced as abstinence from taxis, on the walk to her own death. (The four-year count is the known internal inconsistency; as printed per the standing ruling.)