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key travels well, far, and often.  The elusiveness of the thing itself it inversely proportional to the ubiquity of the thing’s effect.
    The effect is here described by Monterro Tulume, a Spanish music critic who has followed the faint scent of the Penderekey from Northern Germany to Puerto Rico, San Francisco to Tokyo, Israel to Poland:
    The audience is discomfited.  Those who do not sense the real change in atmosphere – the spiritual atmosphere of the hall – might attribute their unease to stiff tuxedoes and tight black dresses, to a heating system malfunction, or to the rising warmth of dinner’s Haut-Medoc, Bordeaux.  For some, it is the discordant screech, as they think of it, of out of tune violins.  But this is all calculated, not accidental.  Perhaps it is subject matter – our own mortality, the mortality of others, our own responsibility for the mortality of others.  For yet others, it must be the controlled repetitive chaos that reflects these events, the brain-scratching staccato followed by endless minor notes and flatness drawn out into a thin wire of frisson that threads its way up and through the listener’s spine to settle in the base of her skull.  In that place, dark thought foments.  Assumptions are challenged, comfort is stripped away, nothing is taken for granted.  She sees herself as herself, and the thought is terrifying.
    She does not, however, even know that the key is there.  She feels it, but she does not see it jangling in the conductor’s pocket, a jagged quarter note, all strange angles and spiny protuberences, surrounded by a tiny cloud of key signatures, leger lines, semi-breves, and treble clefs.  Only the conductor knows of the key and its purpose, which is to open a basement vault in the Sparda Bank, Hamburg.  It is rumored that the “hidden” works reside there – Gomulka Emigrates his Jewish Wife and ZOMO et KOR – which are, it is said, written in the un-utterable keys of Ż and ę.  It is good that the key remains hidden.  Who knows what might happen to the woman, should she access those hidden works?  The possibilities are horrific.
     
    Key to the Labyrinths
     
    The key is crafted of iron, shaped in the form of the arabic letter meem , signifying mortal existence and its end, according to Abd’ al Ansab.  I remember it well, and if I had to tell a story about the key, it would be told in this manner:
    On the 13th of August, 1944, I visited a noted journalist in Buenos Aires.  As most people do, I browsed his bookshelf while he retrieved rum from his cellar.  I was struck by the utter ordinariness of his collection – style manuals, classic works of Roman and Greek origin (many in their original language), Kierkegaard and his commentators, several thesauri, a Portuguese translation of Kafka’s complete works.
    I turned from the bookshelf of the low coffee table that hunched before his sofa.  Atop the table rested a bulbous tome, thick as five fingers, seething to be read, though I did not, at the time, know the language.  The front cover was rounded from bulk, looking like a leather-backed turtle replete with knobs – thick leather embossments – into which were engraved short sayings in Arabic.  Only many years later did I realize that I was seeing a very rare, possibly unique copy of Ibn Arabi’s al-Futahat al-Maghrib .
    I picked up the tome and held it above the table.  With my free hand I opened the pages, noting immediately the horror vacui evinced by the many hand-written illustrations, side-notes, and charts that filled every margin of the book.  I stopped on a page that had been book-marked by a small, thin iron key that mimicked the shape of one of the repeating characters in the text-body and notes.  For a time I admired the key as it rested on the page, but had to rub my eyes to rid them of the weariness-induced illusion that the key grew thinner with time.  I would surely have to take a taxi home.
    I was startled, once the