13th sentence of the 13th book

"Mardou Fox" (real-life Alene Lee)

The 13th book on my Kerouac bookshelf is Jack Kerouac's The Subterraneans (Grove Press, 1958), and the 13th sentence (in honor of today being the 13th day of the month) is:

"And what for you want all those people?"

Admittedly, I followed a strict sentence-counting practice to arrive at the above as the 13th sentence. That is, I counted a phrase as a sentence if it ended with either an em dash or a period/question mark and the next word was capitalized. I counted "'Mardou?'" as a sentence for that reason, and perhaps shouldn't have, but applying precise rules to the mystics of numerology makes a certain weird sense to me. I suspect if I run all 31 sentences together at the end it will read eerily coherent. And as I stated at the outset, 23/23/23 should be especially meaningful.

Once again, today's sentence makes little sense without context, which should be an impetus for you to re-read (or heaven forbid, read) The Subterraneans.