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phosphora faded from my sight, to see that the key had, in fact, sunk into the book. Not merely into the crook of the binding, but through the pages and words, though the parchment and ink remained unchanged by its progress.  Again, I rubbed my eyes.
    I looked for the key, but it had seemingly disappeared.  I checked behind me on the sofa – perhaps I had just laid it to the side and forgotten about it.  I looked at the floor, but it was not to be found.  I was most embarrassed and was thinking up an apology for the lost key when my host walked through the doorway, a tumbler of rum in each hand. 
    The key slipped through the binding of the book – through , not around – and fell to the table, clattering loudly.  I looked up at my host, jaw gaping, and slammed the book’s cover shut far more loudly than I had intended.  I set the book down clumsily, sandwiching the key between the tome and the table.
    The reporter walked over to me and smiled, handing me one of the tumblers.  I was glad for the rum’s sharpness, each sip bringing reality burning back into my throat.
    He smiled at me.  Then, picking up the book, he turned to the exact page I had been admiring earlier.  I looked down at the table where the key should have been, but it was not there.  Instead it was, as before, wedged between the book’s pages.
    The reporter read, translating from the Arabic: “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 quaffed my drink, thanked my host, then left in utter astonishment.  He smiled, as if pleased with the oddity of the situation.
    It was only a short time ago that I learned that Ibn Arabi’s al-Futahat al-Maghrib is still unfound, having been lost to Berber raiders over 900 years ago, though its existence is irrefutably confirmed in several catalogs of Ibn Arabi’s personal libraries.
     
    Bentham’s Eye
     
    Since its inception in the mind’s eye of Jeremy Bentham, the Panopticon has been the focal center of a contentious philosophical debate on the nature of power and control in the modern state.  Despite the varied, sometimes chaotic reactions to the proposed structure, the building itself has never been built.  It is, in its very essence, the greatest prison/laboratory/asylum/quarantine that never was.
    The key to the Panopticon, however, is a very real object, now in the possession of Professor Emeritus Hans Vansanno, resident of Bern, Switzerland.  It is carved from a single piece of crystal, a smooth, rounded key of elliptical shape, unlike the jagged-edged keys to which most of us are accustomed.
    The central motif of the key is, as one would expect, an eye.  Not just any eye, though.  Bentham’s key is modeled after the reformer’s own eye – his left, to be exact; the droopy one that caused him such grief and made him the subject of much mockery as a young student.  The very eye that taught him about the emotionally painful relationship between being seen and powerlessness, and the converse relationship between authority and over-sight.
    All biographical inferences aside, the object itself is an opus of inventiveness, surpassing the clever design even of the building that it has never unlocked.  Its curvatures were cut and ground in such a way that the holder of the key sees on its surface only his reflection, no matter at what angle or distance it is held.  He who holds the key to the Panopticon has the image of himself always before him.
    But Bentham’s audacity, craftsmanship, and genius is most powerfully made manifest when one catches the reflection of his own pupil within the key’s crystalline lens.  If you are so fortunate, or unfortunate, to see into Bentham’s eye seeing your eye seeing Bentham’s eye seeing your eye . . ..  If you are caught in that visual gravity well, you will understand that the entire world and all its inhabitants can be, and indeed is a