Scowling moon! Why do you let raindrops fall? Especially on a night like this where the inward is expanding and where the Seine is trembling like an old woman. Cobbles! Don’t talk to me of stones, my brain is on fire. J’ai mal à la tête monsieur le mayor. Put away your vibraphone and guitar, no one believes in the brotherhood of man anyway.

Suddenly the sun appears like a cracked egg, sliding its yoke up the horizon. I need to get to the Louvre. Only history makes things coherent. I have been feverish on account of being healthy. The doctor gave me a prescription of proverbs and told me to avoid poetry and bildungsroman as it could cause longing disease. What is it like, you say? Well, cinematically it’s like Godard, musically it’s like a mosquito trapped in a monkey’s brain. I must get to the Louvre because of what I lost since becoming middle class. Derisory exclamations of laughter, but it’ll get you in the end. Then panic. You are not what you ought to be. Not even close. Failure is stamped on the inside of your eyelids for you to read in your sleep. Petition the minister of The Good Life, if you want. All he’ll tell you is to take a dose of Bernard Shaw. No remedy there. I even became Bernard Shaw, still no success. I even climbed on the back of a cardinal and touched the clouds with a crucifix, still nothing. The culture is too diffuse, too many hessian vegan hamburgers for any movement. Clutching for the Homeric no longer works. Despite the need to transcend, you end up with combustion engines, calamari and outraged and enraged feminists. Why? Jesus died and the books say he had to. I know this: if I could, I’d live in a jungle hut with seventeen orange cats. Thus, cinematically, it’s a telephoto lens of a quivering face. Artistically, it’s two red dots on the clergyman’s daughter’s underpants; theoretically, it’s the frequency of the stitch in the clergyman’s trousers. Of course it was totally indecent of them to tell her that her history was in the image. She was descended from the word. Then came the image, a blasphemy, then Nietzsche killed God in 1882 and now she doesn’t exist anymore. She only breathes in the empty dreams of the desperate, and so an end. I applied to the aristocracy but they rejected me on account that I wasn’t poor enough. These are my money troubles. They disliked my attachment to order. I shouted for joy. Finally someone dislikes me. I let loose a poem.

Crying is raining out
Your love
Not
That you may love less
But that you make room
For
More tears of love

And so I was sick on the metro where the un-hosed wear plastic clothes and the homeless smell of vinegar and dead fish. Rejection by the élite is bad, but rejection by the poor is fatal. I asked a fat bum on the metro what the deal is. 

‘Formidable! Terra Cotta, Terra Cotta, Terra Cotta,’ he said.

‘Thank Christ for that,’ I replied. 

I thanked him and he gave me some money. I looked up and saw my two children, eleven and seven, flying down to me. I turned to all the miserables and declared that I didn’t have any children despite being divorced before I was married. At this point these spectral creatures turned into cups of Beaujolais and were tasty. Things slowed. 

‘Where’s your paintbrush now, Monsieur?’ A tattooed and bearded gendarme said to me.

‘It has turned into your baton,’ I said. 

He dematerialised under the pressure of irony. Graphically, we can say its form is sunburst; Linguistically, an oxytonic stress menacing a broken comma; Philosophically, it was a macro-micro event. Cosmos as atom, sun as nucleus, time as change, etc. We are flocculants in a sun ray. Is this the beaten path to the Louvre? I ask the seagulls. 

‘How can you not know?’ they screech.

And they tell me the way but as the crow flies. I tell them I waited for Godot  …  but he showed up! I explained to them, as I mount the bicycle in the child-wine of blurred eye baubles, that I have a bad case of the middle class and I must get to the Louvre before I become normal. The birds vanished by way of Peruvian magic. I felt bodiless as if wine was a function of a summer’s day through the leaves of a willow. I then realised that the birds hadn’t vanished but had transformed. Now swans, they spoke to me in several languages including both ancient and modern Swanish. They said they could raise me above the common place. I loved them immediately and shed volcanic tears. But this love, this passion, is like Perrier: a joy at release, quickly becoming flat, tepid, stale and finally poisonous. Digitally, it is a series of ones and zeros so arranged that they create half a fishhook; religiously, it is a dead padre with a smile on his face; grammatically, it is the apostrophe that cannot hold; and thematically, it is the search for meaning which either cannot be obtained, or once obtained becomes meaningless. In fact it can only be expressed

In a new line
Because
The same lines that existed paragraphically
Are not able to express
What
Can
Be expressed
If the lines
Are broken up
To show 
How fragmentary 
And lonely
Is 
This
Meaning.

They have written out the miraculous and replaced it with an army of Derridista’s, whose aim can be expressed in the following dialogue:

DERRIDISTA: All things are relatively the same. Here, your brain is a pumpkin.

YOU: I punch your pumpkin. Is the pain relative too?

Despite it all, you manage flight with the swans only to notice you’ve got cancer and so crash down again on the streets among the pigeons at the foot of Marianne. 

‘I’m looking for the Louvre,’ I scream. 

If I could find the extraordinary, everything would be normal. 

Staring down at me was a giant in a high-vis, eating hotdogs and talking babel. There was movement in his pants and he pulled his fake hand out of his bright green plastic tracksuit. With polymer lips he made such a dull speech that a star died. His face was that of Marechal Pétain. I ran but he ran just as fast. I turned back and saw that computer games were screening in his eyes. On his army cap was a statuette of a lactating feminist. On the ends of his moustache bristles hung computer mice and his shoes were tied with swastikas. Suddenly, out of his nose came a series of mobile phones and a crop of legalised marijuana. On the top row of his teeth were a series of footballers in icon form, on the bottom row, porn stars. Crude oil was pouring out of his hands and stained his pants. His t-shirt was made of logos. His navel was exposed and there stood the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and all seven members of the Politburo Standing Committee. I turned, his pants flew apart and, with his unlettered teenage hand, he grabbed the organ resembling a sewage pipe. At the head of it was the face of a billionaire who opened his mouth to a gush of green slime and giant ants dressed as prostitutes. I ran down an alleyway but the Marechal was adroit for a septuagenarian teenager. Out of his left kneecap burst the joint chiefs of staff and out of his right, the harem of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Suddenly his shirt burst, his nipples drum circles. Exuding from his shins, in stick figure form, were a man and woman wearing leather and steel as Sadism (man) and Masochism (woman). I looked down and realised I was running on piano keys. Without hesitating I ran 6/8 time in Bb major. I knew he couldn’t follow. For this was the music of irony. All the youth could do was to cannon green slime out of the billionaire in a wayward corybantic frenzy. I watched in awe as fully dressed politicians shot out covered in sludge. There were other things among the foul ooze. For example, phials of toxic masculinity, gypsies, landfills and radicalised minorities. I turned away disgusted (ten on the Smolensky Scale) and between A and Bb was a bookstore. I entered. I mentioned to the book keeper that Paris needs more trees, he shrugged and pointed to a long table. Around the table sat Samuel Johnson and members of THE CLUB. Excluded, and sitting on the floor, was Jean Jacques Rousseau surrounded by purple-haired students and anarchists. But the par blind old gentleman began to declaim. 

‘Half of genius, sirs, is the devil.’

‘And the other half, sir?’ replied Sir Joshua Reynolds.

‘The other half, sirs, is fighting the devil,’ Johnson replied.

‘He were better off to love the devil,’ said Oliver Goldsmith in his usual cynical waspishness.

‘Genius is not thirteen colonies,’ said Edmund Burke.

Johnson registered his disgust with a discombobulated cough. ‘Love, sir? Love? Are you to find virtue there?’

‘Why, sir?’ said Reynolds. 

‘Why, sirs, love exists for without its drunkenness the earth would not be peopled,’ Johnson said with straight backed certainty. 

‘Why, sir?’ said Reynolds. 

‘Why, sirs, because he who ends up loving the devil will destroy himself. He who ends up destroying the devil will fall in love with himself. That, Sirs, is why we invented society. It is how we can hide our cowardice.’

‘Sir, I stand for the law,’ said Goldsmith.

‘Sir, you will never need a chair.’

‘Why, sir?’

‘Why, sirs, because you will stand a long time if you wait for the law.’

I asked the shopkeeper the way to the Louvre.

‘Here’s what you do,’ he said, ‘hail a taxi, ask the driver where he wants to go. Then walk away.’

I thanked him and went into the small confessional box next to the coffee machine.

‘Forgive me, Father, for I have not sinned,’ I said and sat down.

‘Tell me about it,’ the priest began. ‘There’s a lot of it about. Non-sinners everywhere. New wave saintism I calls it. Mind you, there was a bit of it about in the eighties with Mitterrand. How that man ever go into power  …  Well, my son, what ails you?

‘Father, I tried stirring the pot.’

‘Ooh I know, everyone tries. I had Marge Depuis in the other day and you know what she told me what was happening in number twenty two, you know on Avenue Foch. I couldn’t believe it at first, but it does happen, doesn’t it? I mean it does go on, doesn’t it? You wouldn’t think such things could go on. So I says to Marge, you’re having me on. No, she says, swearing on a stack of bibles, she says the Swarinski’s are doing  …  you know what with the  …  you know who. Disgusting, I says. But then they are jews, aren’t they? And they do go in for that kind of thing, don’t they? Then I had Justine on Monday tell me she used to go there. Confirmed it. I mean, people really are despicable. You know I had Foucault in here the other day, you wouldn’t believe what he told me. He likes interfering with  …  well I mean it’s enough to make a cat cry. Only on Tuesday I had Maurice Plantine in here, you know the writer. Oof, you could of knocked me down with a feather. He confessed to having a cellar full of German novels. I says to him, you filthy devil, you go burn that right away. I mean  …  Oh did I tell you I heard the confession of Benito Mussolini the other day …  no that’s not right. It wasn’t Mussolini it was the other one. You know the one with the bunga bunga. Marscapone? Bellerini? Oh, the fat one. Anyway you won’t believe what he confessed to  …  cel  …  cleleb  …  you know  …  life without  …  I mean. I mean. I can tell you it was hard giving absolution to that one. So anyways, I says to him. Look here, Bellanocharini, I says to him, look you little fascist perv, no rumpy pumpy is disgusting  …  I mean. I mean. I mean. And he laughs. He says, mio pardre, perché arrabiato? Oh no you don’t, I says to him. You aren’t going to charm me out of it. So I gave him the nuclear option. Pilgrimage! I had to do it, didn’t I? Barefoot to Lourdes, I ordered him. But, just between you and me, people like that can’t be reformed can they? I mean you try, but they just can’t do it. I mean just on Sunday, or was it Saturday, I had the Pope’s son in here, the one who calls himself the Jesuit. Ha, Jesuit my foot. Well, anyways you wouldn’t believe what he confessed to  …  charity to the poor. Unbelievable isn’t it? And in holy orders too? I gave that one a hundred rosaries I can tell you. I blame the parents. Monkey see monkey do. I mean that’s where the real moral degeneration comes from. The kids just haven’t got a chance these days have they? I mean I had a twelve year old in the other day. I was just finishing up with the knitting, and this little beast walks in and confessed to being terrified of touching himself. That’s all they think about these days, isn’t it? I mean it’s all over the TV. All this decency. I mean it was hard not to be sick. I told him, if you don’t start touching yourself Jesus will weep. You’ve got to scare them, don’t you? I mean it’s the only way. How else will they learn? I just don’t know where they are getting all this stuff. It’s all that Facebook, I suppose. I fear for the next lot. Soon they will outlaw kissing, and when that happens let me tell you there’ll be no one coming to confession. That’s for sure. You know I was just saying the other day to Father Montjoy, I says to him, Father, and he says, yes Father, so I says, Father, and he pauses while I speak meantime, so I says, Father how will it all end? And he says, well, Father, just the other day I had Alan de Champ Dupris, you know the gymnast, and he was in my box confessing to the unmentionable. I mean he’s a gold medalist, father says and I says to father, ooh I know, you never can tell, and father says to me, no that’s right, Father, you never can tell I mean it’s not written on the face, is it? I mean the other day I had … ’

‘Excuse me, Father.’ I said.

‘Oh  … yes. Yes. Well, my son, it isn’t so bad. I mean we’ve all stirred the pot once in our life.’

‘But with one hand, Father.’

‘Yes … well. Alright I absolve you. Just say ten Heil Fairies and one Our Future.’

‘Thank you, Father.

Our future, which art in Heiligenstadt,
Hallowed be the insane
Thy kitchens will come
To flambé with rum
The eggs as it is in Boeuf Bourguignon.
Give us this dish our daily breasts
And forget about our thanks,
As we forget those that unthank us
And lead us not into terra-formations,
But detach us from egregious sandwiches,
A woman.’

I turned and was about to go but stopped and asked the priest.

‘But what about Mohammed?’

‘September,’ he said.

‘OK.’

I asked the book keeper the way to the Louvre. 

‘Twenty Five,’ he said.

‘Thanks.’

He pointed to the history section of the bookshelves. Medically, I walked with polio step; musically, common time; culturally, insensitive. However, my legs in the jelly of their motion broke dimensions like already shattered glass. Thus, what was bookstore was both bookstore and deep space. I was floating among galaxies and nebulae of wisdom, beauty and truth. Its reality altered according to wish, and time seemed unhinged. In fact, years passed, comets completed their ellipses, stars were born and died. Tranquil music synthesised this great act. Pythagorus wept. Cinematically, it was water dripping onto wind chimes. Then a series of bells rung, which marked human endeavour. There were five. These were, husbandry, writing, science, culture and ice cream. A pan pipe took control of the cliché. An equilateral triangle kept time as the piano asked the violin. It seemed like the world beyond the swans for there, in the blue and ochre nebula among the Brontë’s, Bellow and Bocaccio was a wonder. I picked it off the shelf and beheld the reflections, refractions and gaseous folds of a new dream. A xylophone informed me its wish thinking was delicious. A drum told me it was fatal. I then saw an orange supernova behind Nabokov, rendered in Japanese watercolour. I asked Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, who had suddenly appeared, what it was that the visible wanted to say to the musical. But his pages were black with white ink. 

A powerful tonic against common sense is reality. Even among the pudding-eating classes of the nineteenth arrondissement, there is the predictable. But what about this expanding ring of brown dust that resembles an eye? He was once the king of the stars. Emotionally, we are the silence under still water. As the sun rises behind Aristophanes, and as it will set on Zola, Tibetan monks must chant.

These stars, as I turn to Shakespeare and Tolstoy, are in fact pure music. Biologically, they are photosynthesis; thematically, the exhausted reunion of lovers long parted. It is a magical kind of red and yellow. It is a Constable mixed with a Pollock. It is quiet like an empty cave. Nor can Updike’s volubility ever fill it. Who is in charge here? I asked both consciousness and sub-consciousness, but they referred the question to third parties. Then the red sun burst through Dickens and demanded ethics. I clung on to Karamazov (I wasn’t sure which one) as much as I could and managed to steady myself despite the shock wave. I heard C# two octaves apart, light years away, as another shock wave came: an exploding sun. I realised it was all coming from Balzac. I appealed to the miser. Yet Grandet had become Gavroche. He told me that in order to progress man must kiss the fire. Olfactorily, it was lilly-of-the-valley. 

Like a pigeon’s wings flapping in a wind tunnel, I moved. I caught myself weeping. Aesthetically, it was gutter water in a gloomy late afternoon. It was as though I was dripping down the drain into an underground tunnel all dim. A metro tunnel. In the corner scurried away the rat-faced people. Symbolically, their shadows represent the drug of fear. Doses are delivered in tabloid or screen form. Ten minutes of fear five times a day has been proven to make lies, conspiracies, mass delusion, anti-feminist feminists, the Book of Job and moral unicorns. It is very good against infections of calm Celtic fluted Sunday afternoons where clouds drift as you sit under the oak tree dreaming. It’s also effective against the pleasure of baths, risk taking, independence, freedom, joy, tricorne hats, rustling the hair of unfamiliar children and laughing at the misfortunes of others. 

I was in the the train stopped at speed, then it stopped. I got off and walked into a theatre and down the long dim central aisle to the stage. I sat down in the front row and there on stage were three characters with Chinese faces. There was no one else in the theatre except for the brontosaurus in one of the boxes. He, or she, or he-she or she-he, or sheeh or heehs or eehhs or shhee(s) eyed me with eyeglasses severely and critically. It made a note in its notebook. It was clear to me that it was a theatrical critic with an expanded portfolio for literature, modern art, food, fashion and giant underpants. As it sucked a smoothie of pulped leaves and broken careers, it yawned and spoke. 

‘Seen it. Cliché. He wants to be Jesus! Boring. Flatulence would be a better. This is hardly an immaculate conception.’

I tried to look away but I felt the hot glare of the critic like that of the pharisees in the trial of Christ. I couldn’t justify my existence. I couldn’t signal my virtue. I couldn’t trust in the axiomatic. I couldn’t say I believed in animal welfare. The critic hissed and called me a worm. The cock crowed thrice and the critic was denied. Still ashamed, I turned to the stage and the three oriental characters became animate. There was an old father and two grown sons. The father was lying on his bed. His name was Orange Moon. The two sons were, White Fox and Black Wolf, respectively. 

Orange Moon: Sons. He has come looking for the Louvre.

BLACK WOLF:  Who?

ORANGE MOON: The man.

WHITE FOX: Which man?

Orange Moon: The man.

BLACK WOLF:: The man?

WHITE FOX: Which man?

Orange Moon: The man.

BLACK WOLF:/WHITE FOX: Ohh … 

[Black Wolf begins to soak the old man’s cigars in citronella. This despite the fact

mosquito’s were made redundant in the nineties due to Chirac’s mutualisation of the health

system. Yet Black Wolf cannot give up the habit.]

ORANGE MOON: Sons, be not boring. The critic is here.

WHITE FOX: That’s alright. Since the critic is here, he will be on his best behaviour.

BLACK WOLF: Who?

WHITE FOX: You know.

BLACK WOLF: Who?

WHITE FOX: [Hesitating then whispers] you know  …  the writer.

BLACK WOLF: Shh. ssh. Do not say that. Never mention him. It’s bad luck. 

WHITE FOX: Sorry.

BLACK WOLF: Sorry usually does it. But don’t do it again. 

I then interrupted their play just to mention that I was the writer. Then the critic interrupted.

‘No you are not the writer! You are the narrator who happens to be a character in a short story. Inflation and conflation. We must have distinct categories. Stay in your place.’

‘Ohh  … ’ I shouted.

BLACK WOLF: If we fail it’s your fault.

ORANGE MOON: May we get on with the play? [He looked at me/narrator/central character] Good. Listen my sons we have been set the task of acting this scene.

WHITE FOX: What scene?

ORANGE MOON: This scene

WHITE FOX: Anything yet?

BLACK WOLF: No. Wait … 

WHITE FOX: Something?

BLACK WOLF: No.

ORANGE MOON: [raises his hand with an idea] We ought to show the pen-stage-audience-critic-reader problem by circling the circle.

‘Excellent,’ the critic said. ‘It’s a touch of early Rubbitallova. The writer is drawing on the beastial within. Man treads a heavy path but can produce sweetness. Potential. Potential!’

ORANGE MOON: We are here because the writer must make a short story long. 

BLACK WOLF: Father, do not mention him. Apologise. 

ORANGE MOON: No, I’m afraid it won’t do. You will have to sacrifice one of the cigars to him. [BW goes to the cigar stack and takes it to the small bedside table. He puts it on the table then walks back.]

Suddenly I realised that the ‘I’ I was using was not the ‘I’ of the narrator. And there was no ‘I’ of the writer and no ‘I’ directing the stage. I trembled. Yet I didn’t tremble because I had no ‘I’.

‘Will you be quiet!’ shouted the critic. ‘Stop interfering with the play with your drivelling nonsense, your pathetic display of self pity, your pretensions to grandeur. They are performing art. Art! It has such  …  such  …  potential.’

ORANGE MOON: What we are trying to do is to ask you, reader, to put yourself on our stage and do the acting for us. That way we can sit in the aisles and watch you write the story on the stage with our pen.

WHITE FOX:: What about … no I won’t mention him.

BLACK WOLF: The narrator/main character of the short story says he doesn’t exist. We’re brain synapses, or products of cerebral fluctuations of an unconscious arrangement between energy and matter. 

WHITE FOX: Will it work father?

ORANGE MOON: It must.

BLACK WOLF: Anything?

ORANGE MOON: What are they doing? What are you doing? No. It’s no good they have failed. You, reader, have failed in this one simple task of sympathy.

WHITE FOX: What about … ?

ORANGE MOON: Ssh. Don’t mention him. Ahh. You will have to sacrifice another cigar.  [White Fox sacrifices a cigar.]

‘Excellent. Late Fiddilapini,’ said the critic. ‘The father symbolises the struggle of the reader to communicate with the son, which is to say the world. The tension between father and son is exacerbated because the reader won’t reach out into heart of the drama.’

WHITE FOX: What are you doing now?

ORANGE MOON: The reader is anticipating our move. But we won’t fall into the reader’s trap. Instead what we will do is follow the critic despite the fact we have been watching the reader secretly.

WHITE FOX: So …

ORANGE MOON: So you, reader, must come on the stage. 

BLACK WOLF: It’s heresy.

WHITE FOX: Since we are breaking the fourth wall, it’s easy to break the fifth. 

ORANGE MOON: Technically the reader doesn’t exist, since they are narrators of their own writing-stage-pen-narrator problem.

The critic’s eyes widened. ‘Superb. Superb. Middle Burnawich. Yes, the critic is in on the stage-page-pen-reader issue. The critic, self-critical inside the heart of the drama. This resolves the page-stage-critic question. The reader is the drama. The critic is therefore non-dramatic architecture. Since we are all page and stage, neither things actuarily exist. The media have failed to be the message. Now I ask you. No, not you, reader, but the meta-reader, the reader between readers, the exponent of between-readers, what do you think?’

ORANGE MOON: Yes! 

‘Shut up! Now the self-critical critic is the heart of this drama by exposing that there is no heart thus the critic becomes the point.’

BLACK WOLF: Shall we bring the reader onto the stage?

‘Yes, but the physical stage is a patriarchal impost.’ said the critic. ‘The reader is the victim of narrative oppression. Yet the shape of the drama is dodecahedral. Clearly the reader is in shock. He is sitting there sweating and blushing bored.’

WHITE FOX: The reader is sleeping.

‘The idealised reader!’ said the critic. ‘The reader as we know him or her doesn’t exist. What we have looking at the page is a collocation of electrical impulses pretending to have a personality. Having eliminated the reader, we then invent the reader.’

My arms fell off.

BLACK WOLF: The narrator/character arms fell off. He is falling apart. 

ORANGE MOON: [Looks at narrator] I’m afraid.

BLACK WOLF: Why?

ORANGE MOON: If the narrator/character goes, what will happen to us, my sons?

My nose fell off. I was melting.

‘I am melting,’ I said.

WHITE FOX: Where is the drama now?

BLACK WOLF: There. Yes, I understand it now. The writer doesn’t exist. 

ORANGE MOON: Maybe it could work without him. But if he is the writer, then we are finished.

WHITE FOX: But father, the critic?

ORANGE MOON: Yes I know. If the critic were on the stage …  this stage …  it’s just possible the narrator would completely disappear. 

My ears fell off.

WHITE FOX: Is the critic preparing to come on stage?

ORANGE MOON: It could be. 

[They all look at the critic] 

My hair fell out.

‘No,’ shouted the critic. ‘If I go on the stage it will destroy the entire universe. The pen’s motion is directed by the random location of electrons. So that the drama is between the valence shell and the nucleus.’

I disappeared.

‘I disappeared,’ I said.

‘Quiet! Now the empty audience has become the third act. The dead reader was the fourth. And the dead critic will be the first.’

‘I think I have the drama.’ I said

BLACK WOLF: Did you hear that father, he said he thinks he has the drama.

ORANGE MOON: He may well do.

WHITE FOX: Should we do something?

ORANGE MOON: No. Wait until he does something.

WHITE FOX: What if he does nothing?

ORANGE MOON: He will do something, remember sons he needs to go to the Louvre.

WHITE FOX: What if he does nothing?

ORANGE MOON: Then nothing will be done.

BLACK WOLF: He may not do something, but something will be done. 

[There was a loud noise. They looked up and there was you, the reader reading this.]

ORANGE MOON: Who is narrating now?

WHITE FOX: Square brackets stage direction is narrating.

[That is correct.]

‘I knew it. I knew. Wonderful. You are here. Now you are on the stage. You, reader, are the writer.’ [Said the critic.]

[You, reader, felt uneasy holding the burden of the drama. Naturally you didn’t want to bore yourself, so nervously, you made some joke. But it wasn’t funny. You felt ashamed and wanted to pass the baton back to the players on the stage. But they were in your room, looking down on you with an eye glass as you stood on the stage, alone. You looked out into the empty auditorium and felt a desperate need to escape. This does you no favours because in fact you don’t exist. Never-the-less, the critic is waiting impatiently and you have yet to even make a gesture. No, you can’t retreat. If you do that then the whole universe will be destroyed.]

‘Now that we have the reader in his proper place, we can get on with the show.’ [Said the critic]

BLACK WOLF: Father do you think it was because the narrator disappeared?

ORANGE MOON: No doubt. It seems if you get rid of the narrator, you have to put the reader on the stage.

WHITE FOX: Is that a rule?

ORANGE MOON: Sons, there are no rules except the rule that there are rules.

[You cringed.]

WHITE FOX: Well …  what about square brackets stage direction?

[I cringed]

BLACK WOLF: And the critic?

ORANGE MOON: The critic is holding the book.

[They looked at you and you said nothing.]

BLACK WOLF: Why doesn’t the reader do something?

WHITE FOX: I don’t know.

ORANGE MOON: Because of the presence of square brackets. The narrator in effect has gagged you, reader. Until the narrator breaks his brackets, the reader will remain in shock.

[I do not want to break my brackets.]

ORANGE MOON: He cannot talk directly. But we could ventriloquise him.

BLACK WOLF: Are you there square brackets? You can speak through me.

[Good idea.]

WHITE WOLF: Are you there?

BLACK WOLF: Yes. This is square brackets speaking. I am speaking through Black Wolf. Am I      now the narrator?

ORANGE MOON: Yes. Actor-stage-page-pen narrator.

WHITE FOX: Bang!

ORANGE MOON: What bang?

WHITE FOX: Bang!

ORANGE MOON: Excellent. But where is Black Wolf now?

BLACK WOLF: I and narrator are one.

ORANGE MOON: Look, the reader is about to speak.

YOU: If you break all the rules, there can be no justice.

BLACK WOLF: That means I am not Black Wolf

WHITE FOX: No?

BLACK WOLF: I have become the character/narrator

ORANGE MOON: Or not.

‘No you’re not. I am the character/narrator,’ I said. And I rematerialised suddenly and became a certified narrator again.

BLACK WOLF: So I am Black Wolf?

WHITE FOX: Yes

‘Excellent,’ said the critic. ‘The transformation reverses the double irony. Thus the pen is the reader.’

BLACK WOLF: Now what do we do?

ORANGE MOON: Well in the old days we used to sing. Oh yes, your actor then was a complete         type. Sing, dance, mime, contort, ride horses, recite poetry. Now it’s all ‘social         justice’ and ‘gender identity’. 

‘Excuse me,’ I said to Orange Moon, ‘but you can’t use quotation marks. You are on the stage.’

ORANGE MOON: You see what I have to put up with these days. 

BLACK WOLF: But we are actors

ORANGE MOON: Whores! Whores! Great big sensitive whores is what we are. We must say         what’s on the script and we must smile when we want to cry. We perform. We         must take it. We are whores.

BLACK WOLF: Will it work?

ORANGE MOON: It always worked in the past.

WHITE FOX: I suppose there ought to be a more elegant way.

ORANGE MOON: No we must end it and end now.

BLACK WOLF: OK

Then Zeus came down on a machine and the play ended to the music of the North Korean National Anthem.

Suddenly I stood by the shining Seine and in the middle of a machine strike. Vending machines, washing machines and parking metres were demanding better working conditions. They were performing a revolutionary square dance. I asked an ATM which way it was to the Louvre. It spat money in my face and I turned away. 

‘The problem,’ said a microwave, ‘is that my sub-conscious is bigger than I am.’ Popcorn shot out of it. The vending machines were getting drunk.

‘What is the opposite of a hole?’ asked a checkout scanner.

I walked away disgusted. Our solution seems to be to burn nature and print money. Nature cries and is the wind from across a far off sea. I turned the corner. Musically, it was a series of slow shifting chords. Slowly. Slowly. I gave up. Even in an incoherent world, there ought to be a point. I leaned against the corner of a building, looking down. There was no going forward. If the Deep-Ape is the ego-pure then the Dark-Ape is the ego-pure with vice, and the Bright-Ape is the ego-pure with virtue. But that’s all nonsense. I followed the path. I contended and it got me no where. I struggled to find meaning and found none. 

I suppose we could wait for the rapture with its blood red sky. All could ascend, hatters and non-hatters kissing. Old ladies smoking marijuana, truck drivers in their trucks, old sea-dogs in their tugs, Prince Charles talking ex-cathedra about an old pomegranate tree, and Nick, DJ and Sonny flying in their usual fashion. I too ascend among the parrots through layers of thick hope. Suddenly above me, I see the glass pyramid of the Louvre. I rush over, only to shatter it.