Page 135
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The duck performance spreads through the bar, making people, dog, and Animal all twitch into a shared comic pattern of bodily response.
The page turns slapstick into social contagion. The dog's yelp, the duck's wings, the men holding up their guts, and the imagined vacationing lake make performance something the room cannot keep outside itself.
The duck spectacle becomes metaphysical and then grotesque. Animal's 'brain began to shake too; about atoms mov-ing for the joy of no purpose', asking whether 'the dog, or the duck, or the Animal' has 'a cause, when each ones twitching was making sense'. The dog yelps, sensing 'something inhuman in pretending not to be', and the duck's bounding wings infect the bar: men stand 'not out of necessity', and others piss 'directly in order to make the floor shine' like 'there privately occupied vacationing lake' - 'A bubb-led acid stream flowing through particled filth' that can be 'made to glisten with a shoe'. 'The duck was happy. And for Animal, It cost him nothing.'