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trying hard, straining with all his might, Ishmail can-
    not bunch up a small and dainty silk cushion, for it's a cushion
    of rock-solid silk; nor, though bringing his foot down hard on
    it, disturb a tuft of hair on a Turkish rug; nor, with his hand,
    turn a light-switch on and off. No, poor Ishmail is now an outcast
    from two worlds.
    Ishmail (as it slowly, far too slowly, dawns on him) is living in
    a film, a film that was shot, wholly without his companions'
    authorisation or approval, by M., Faustina's suitor, on a short
    tour of his (Ishmail's) island in or about 1930.
    Whilst a fatal malady attacks "his" island's baobabs, whilst a
    mould crawling with tiny, malignant bugs starts to run riot in
    its swimming pool, whilst its villa is rapidly going to wrack and
    ruin, a haphazard sprinkling of raindrops all too soon turns into
    a noisy downpour, a tropical monsoon, so that a concomitant
    tidal flow, rising and falling, flooding that coastal construction
    that Ishmail first saw from on top of a hill, activating its circuitry
    (circuitry which had initially struck him as totally baffling) and
    causing its dynamo to hum into motion, brings about a curious
    and oddly tragic situation in which, word for word, act for act,
    so many instants (instants long past but also immortal) visibly
    start to shrink into what you might call ions of chronology, just
    as, with an apparatus built from vitalium, Martial Cantaral would
    allow any ghosdy carcass to act out, in a vast frigidarium, and
    again and again right up to doomsday, a crucial instant from its
    past.
    Things look normal, but looks can play tricks on you. Things
    at first look normal, till, abrupdy, abnormality, horrifying in its
    inhumanity, swallows you up and spits you out.

    * * *
2 3
    Anton Vowl's ambition is to find out just what brand of affinity
    links him with Bio/s book: on his rug, constantly assailing his
    imagination, is his intuition of a taboo, his vision of a cryptic
    sort of witchcraft, of a void, a thing unsaid: a vision, or loss of
    vision, a mission or an omission, both all-knowing and knowing
    nothing at all. Things may look normal, but. . .
    But what?
    Vowl simply cannot work it out.
    2 4
    1
    Concluding with an immoral papacy's abolition and
    its claimant's contrition
    Days pass. Trying to work this thing out to his own satisfaction,
    Vowl starts writing a diary, captioning it with just two words:
    A V O I D
    and continuing:
    A void. Void of whom? Of what?
    A curious motif runs (or ran or has run or might run)
    through my Aubusson, but it isn't only a motif, it's also a
    fount of wisdom and authority.
    An imago as snug as a bug in my rug.
    What, on occasion, it brings to mind is a painting by
    Arcimboldo, a portrait of its own artist, possibly an
    astonishing portrait of a haggard Dorian Gray, of a bilious
    albino: an Arcimboldian jigsaw, not of shrimps and
    crayfish, not of a cornucopia offruit, nor of snaky, tortuous
    pistils twisting upwards to mimic a human brow or chin
    or nostril, but of a swarming mass of sinuous bacilli of so
    subtly skilful a combination that you know straightaway
    that such a portrait had a body at its origin, without its
    affording you at any instant a solitary distinguishing mark,
    so obvious is it that it was its artist's ambition to fashion a
    work which, by masking and unmasking, closing and
    disclosing, turn and turn about, or mayhap in unison, would
    hatch a plot but totally avoid giving it away.
    2 5
    It's hard, initially, to spot any modification at all. Tou
    think at first that it's your own paranoia that's causing you
    to find anomaly, abnormality and ambiguity all around
    you. Abruptly, though, you know, or think you know, that
    not too far off is ... a thing, an incarnation that distracts
    you, acts upon you and numbs you. Things rot around
    you. Tou panic, you sink into an unnatural sloth; you start
    losing your mind. A sharp - though not, alas, so short -
    shock chills you to your marrow. If this horror is only