Long Shot of Delft

Perhaps the strangest of all microscopic particles was the neutrino. Unlike other particles, it could not be brought to rest, but always moved with the speed of light, spinning as it moved in an extraordinary way, quite differently from the ordinary spin of a ball, for example, which must be rotated through 360 degrees in order to present the same aspect as before. But a neutrino needed two rotations through 360 degrees to achieve this. It was as though it had a double view of the universe, one for each complete rotation.

It was a story of fear. You could actually smell the fear. But this was not his story. Arthur and Pamela entered the delapidated icerink amidst the ruins. At the far end, a tour guide counted his group of twelve. He noticed the intruders  immediately and gestured them to leave. They exited to another enclosure, where people  were climbing and descending a spiral stairway, on which they surfaced and submerged underground again, at the same time ascending and descending, prisoners of a paradoxical geometry of another reality.
It started to rain. Arthur opened his umbrella and involuntarily took a short flight over the pilgrims. They looked up and applauded. He set down on a landing and got sick. He sensed it coming up his throat and vomited saliva and a redish substance which spilled into a little pool on the ground. He felt relieved and curious about what he had thrown up. He found a splintered stick and out of the snot and saliva he fished a big lump of red, not unlike a piece of liver or lung tissue, attached to a umbilical cord of viscous consistency and an unknown, slightly cool material. Pamela approached him and touched his shoulder which was full of slime. She cleaned her hand off on his jacket. They headed back towards Delft.

Arthur awoke, remembering only that he had dreamt of a small lake bay or abandoned harbor that night. Purple water-lilies oscillated on the thin surface glaze of drifting broken glass plates. He walked along the quay to the periphery of the glass zone. There, he dived into the water. He failed to notice that he had cut his wrist on a solitary piece of glass.
He submerged, deeper than he had expected, following the stems of the flowers to the bottom of the lake. Their roots were tiny hands with fingers clutching the rotten posts of a wrecked pier, a sunken remnant from his own past. He was about to lose his breath. Guided by the sun's reflection, he stroked towards a little ladder and climbed up to the pier. He balanced his way across the loose wooden planks towards the pavilion at the outer end, a fragile geometric tracing in the lakescape. Looking back, Arthur saw the Krells approaching, with crawling babies held on leashes. Instinctively, he slid down to his knees and froze like a quadruped. The babies detected him first. They advanced towards him, not realizing though, that he was alive. Peripherally, he perceived other crouching figures, frozen stencils from a time when the domain of the lake was a recess near the frontiers of Alterre, the land of the Krells. He couldn't make out whether they were dead or alive. One of the Krells crossed the planks of the landing. He touched Arthur's throat. Arthur stopped breathing. He knew the person would feel his pulse. The pressure from near asphyxiation got unbearable. Finally, the person withdrew. In the distance, Arthur saw a second Krell touching another figure, shouting: "It's too bad they won't live. But then, again, who does?"
Arthur vaguely remembered having heard this sentence before.

The interior spaces were constantly generated through computing. People experienced the background passing by in little steps. It was never known what happened to them between the jumps, when everything was erased and newly computed.
For orientation they would simply call for a ruler grid and a coordinate indicator. But time was not absolute or uniform. They believed in an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times, where large physical structures may not survive. They might just disintegrate.

Arthur had left the room in the "Astoria" by the abandoned lake domain. Back in Delft, waiting for Pamela and the train to New York, he scanned the newspaper and found an article on some of his friends' installation work. The illustrating photographs were in color. He particularly liked the series of a Catherine wheel like spectroscopic recording of a remote nebula. While reading, vague scenes from the ancient past surfaced from his memory pool, but he was unable to tell whether they had been  dreams or  real live events nor could he describe what it was that he remembered. It was the feeling of reminiscing rather than the actual visual or verbal recollection. The prints possessed a strange translucence, like hand- colored Kodaliths. While turning the pages in a trance, he found to his astonishment that all the pictures were colorized, but it was only while absentmindedly scanning the review of "Secret Sanctions" that he realized that his own world consisted exactly of these very colors, this very graininess. The blade of the bulldozer crashed down into the rhinoceros corpse next to him, missing him only by fractions of an inch. He threw the paper away and leapt from the elevated sidewalk down into the torn-open street. People stumbled helplessly between the rocks and plates of asphalt. Backhoes were all over, advancing rapidly and systematically smashing panicked humans with their blades. The exterminators were pigs. Arthur hardly made it to the kiosk. The woman-vendor stared at him strangely and handed him the New York Times. He turned around. Heavy traffic flooded the newly paved street.
Arthur went to the cathedral. He entered the building, but he immediatley got lost in a maze of chambers and hallways. He climbed myriads of stairs and finally exited to a roof top. He urinated against a spire. It started collapsing. He fell. In his falling he caught a beautifull view over the immense cathedral and its detached monastery. He imagined himself passing by the open cells. He would hear voices of inquisitors, scrutinizing the inhabitants. He frequently overheard the one question: "Quid recordaris?"
The voices would unite into an infinite, inquiring choir that pervaded the cathedral: "What do you remember?"
The suspense followed by the silence of all the defendents would be unbearable.
He finally came to a halt and found himself on the street again. He returned to the station to take the train back to New York. At the far end of the platform there was some commotion. As he approached the group of people, he learned that a woman just had a miscarriage. The tiny foetus was lying on the floor. Arthur registered its minute movements. Excited with the obsession to save it, he started towards the kiosk. The lady was waiting on some costumer.
Arthur yelled at her: "My mother just had a miscarriage!"
The woman was startled.
"I need water".
She headed for the sink. He wanted sparkling mineral water and ice, though. She got the ice from a tin can, and put some cubes into a small white oval thermos and then added Perrier. Arthur rushed back. He put the foetus into the flask which now began transforming into an egg, heating up rapidly. When parts of it started to melt, he hastily put it down on the ground. Only instants later, the receptacle disintegrated, exposing a ginger kitten, lying in a viscous whitish substance. Arthur peeled off the afterbirth and sticky foul remnants of the shell.  He went back to the kiosk. The woman showed him to the kitchenette in the back room, where he washed his hands with mineral water. In the mirror he saw the tiny cat, tottering towards the newspaper stand where the woman took it into her hands. She carried it inside and placed it next to the sink.
"It's Schroedinger's cat," she remarked.
Arthur touched her cunt and she grabbed his cock. He got a hard on. She was quivering. They fucked.
In the meantime, the cat moved from the kitchen to the adjacent living room. There it disappeared; simply because of all things possible some were more probable.
Arthur came before she did. She started kneading her breasts. Two cauliflower growths sprouted from her nipples. Then they opened up into tentacles. The woman called them trolls.
They fucked again.
He took a shower and thought of several titles for his next video tape. Later, he only remembered that he had liked them, but he couldn't recall them anymore.

Arthur opened a tin can of cat food and emptied it into a plate on the ground. Two catlike creatures approached him. They were white lions. He held the lid towards the sun and angled its reflection at the beasts, then he carefully stepped off towards the revolving door of the hotel. They followed him, but the blinding light kept them at a distance. One of them advanced gradually, almost unnoticeably, out of the narrow sector of the beam to cut Arthur off from the shelter.  He barely made it to the door, then threw away the reflector and slid inside the house. Looking outside, he saw that the scenery had changed into a Lower East Side view of Delft in the background. The buildings of the housing project stood out clearly against the shifting light of the sky, strangely remote and deserted. His eyes had a hard time adjusting to the high contrast of the tarred walls and the over-bright sky, a golden band seemed to trace the silhouettes of the houses.
Long after the vision had disappeared, Arthur could still see the image floating before his eyes in an ever-changing palette of radiant colors. Occasionally he would hear the whispering of a ventilator fan. When he opened his eyes, he saw Pamela riding over him. For a moment the world would concentrate only around the two alternating images of her and the vestiges of Delft.
Later, he stepped outside and cut across the water towards Delft. He finally found an open gateway and entered into the  abandoned icerink. He noticed a person -maybe the tour guide- setting fire to a small green bird. The burning creature flew away, passing by the clusters of tropical trees around the rink which immediately went off in flames. When the fire finally died out, hundreds of red birds flocked to the charred branches, unharmed by the blaze.
Arthur wiped away from the spectacle to the inside of an oasis which was surrounded by a wall with an exit door, through which he escaped into the desert. An idling van was waiting, and as he approached it, he peripherally detected a sheik slipping out through an emergency exit and heading towards the main entry, where he started chanting, casting some secret spell over the oasis. At that moment, the van started turning and zooming in closer. Arthur was startled and kicked his head back from the TV screen, only to vaguely catch the blurred credits of the ending movie. He woke up. Pamela was fast asleep.  It had started to rain outside. Thick fog covered the view over Delft.

The days went by slowly. The hotel room  was a mess. The cat had pissed all over. Ann, the woman from the kiosk, had promised to call up Schroedinger and inform him about his cat. But Arthur hadn't heard from her yet. The stench paralyzed him, like a clutching shell, layers of shells around the breathing soft lung tissue.
He forced himself to sleep a lot. He had the most vivid and incredible dreams, but no energy to write them down. For hours on end, he sat in front of the computer, the room darkened, his fingers randomly striking keys.  He would stare into the glaring screen filling with meaningless character assemblies, which he had finally reduced to periods and dashes. It was like a sexual act when you are horny and fuck your brains out but don't ejaculate.
One night, lights were turned on, revealing dozens of big cardboard boxes, that were moving slightly. Through an invisible cue, they sprang open, one after another, cuboid peas with embryonic seeds, rapidly taking the form of male adults. The men started to play dice, ignoring Arthur's attempts to attract their attention. He finally breached into shouting. They abruptly turned around and unanimously said:
"Psst..., we are gambling over the fate of the cat."
Meanwhile, a lot of people had gathered together in the blueish lit room. An elderly man, who somebody introduced as professor Schroedinger, unfolded a fanfold paper or form of considerable length. He signed at the bottom of the last page and then displayed the long paper strip, a print-out of black and white patterns of closely spaced dots and dashes, computer encoded data, which Arthur scanned pointlessly for hints on their meaning.
Schroedinger was gone before Arthur could inform him about the matter of the cat. Arthur overheard somebody mentioning that they had omitted  the entry crediting Schroedinger with the  performance of his mandatory probability shooting test. The choir broke into reciting a poem of statistical measurements of the human body. It sounded very synthetic, and though the space was very small, their reverberating voices generated the ambience of an immense auditorium.
Ibn Ben Gabir entered the room. He was a textile merchant in his mid-thirties, corpulent, blond,  with freckles spattered over  his solarium-tanned face. He invited Arthur to his house.
Ibn Ben Gabir's lover was still in bed.and while he went to fix some drinks, Arthur started kissing her. She pulled him down on the bed. She unzipped his pants and grabbed his swelling cock, then got on her knees and started rubbing her cunt against his back, moved it over his head and pushed it towards his mouth. He licked her and then swept her down to his loins. His cock slipped easily into her.
In his excitement, he was not aware of the presence of a video crew in the room. The camera people got turned on and pulled down their pants. They all wore uniform long white underwear. They sat down on the chairs, their hands moving up and down their cocks inside their garments.
 

Arthur got to the end of the pier and entered the pavilion. He picked up a long shafted chisel, leaned over the railing, then aimed and shot it at one of the eels in the water. It pierced the fish.
He went back to the railroad station. Ann reclined on the long part of an L-shaped bench by the kiosk. Arthur sat down next to her. They looked towards the cathedral, the townscape had turned very grainy again. It was difficult to focus on things. He said to her that if she would close one eye, and move her hand towards the tip of her nose, there would be a certain point where the hand became invisible. They tried it a couple of times.
Then she said: "The invisible never happens."
Somebody had sat down on the short strip next to them. The graininess had increased and the poor resolution barely made it possible to discern even a silhouette. Arthur sensed an undefined uneasiness in the arrival of this anonymous shadow figure.
A phone rang. He reached out his hand and blindly grabbed the receiver.
"Hello?"
It was a hang up.
He heard the train arrive. By now the scene resembled a three dimensional TV snow environment after the end of a day's broadcast. He waded through the random pixel explosions,   which gradually solidified again into the image of the train station. He stepped down the underground conduit to the platform on the other side of the tracks. Some artist had pasted an immense shiny mylar portrait of Virgin Mary onto the concrete. It was slippery and Arthur almost fell when walking across it towards the stairs. Unexpected crowds of people flocked into the waiting train. He could not detect Pamela. Looking for her, he went towards the rear,  but there, all the cars were locked and the train started moving. He spurted towards the front and hurriedly caught one of the doors before closing, but failed to notice that he had jumped ahead of a man on crutches. He leapt inside, leaving the screeching cripple behind on the platform. He found himself a seat facing an advertising box, filled with strange little metal items, spare parts for radiators. While contemplating the strange assemblage that reminded him of the butterfly collection of his childhood, he trailed off to a crest overlooking a pasture near the suburbs of Delft. The abrupt spatial dislocation confused him. He was sitting on a bench, which had the form of the capital letter L. A young woman passed by. She looked at him and must have noticed his bewilderment.
"I have never dreamt you before," she said. Her name was Valerie.
She invited Arthur to come home with her.
Her house was in the old part of the town. Arthur had been there one recent morning. He remembered  strolling with Pamela through the narrow alleys. The little restaurants had just opened. The staff arranged tables and chairs under the small decorated awnings. Some had already exhibited exorbitantly garnished seafood on the tables. It now occured to him that this could easily have happened in Venice.
Arthur spent the night with Valerie. In his dreams he met Schroedinger's cat again.

He found himself in the shower, standing ankle-deep in warm water. Valerie entered the bathroom, undressed and stepped  into the shower. She took a bar of soap and started washing and seducing him. They fucked under the warm rains of the shower.  Occasionally, he glanced through the open window. The sky was fanned with streaks of brilliant red of the rising sun over Delft.
Arthur decided to stay in Delft for a while. He left the "Astoria" without notifing Pamela and took a place in a school house that had been converted to an apartment building. In his space he could switch to various bird's eye positions and even view himself from above.
One night he could not sleep. All horny, he started masturbating, giving himself a blow job, for the first time managing to get his mouth down to his own penis. While he looked at himself from different aspects he called up Valerie and told her about it. She got turned on and started masturbating herself. She wanted to come over immediately. He slipped into some clothes and went downstairs to open the front door for her. On his way he suddenly remembered a room that he had dreamt a while ago. He found the cleaning person waxing the hallway floor in front of it and wondered whether he had spied on him. He stepped into the room. From there he could see into his own space. The door was ajar and he entered his place again, where he found himself still on the phone with Valerie.  Both were still masturbating, sporadically enticing one another to come over and fuck.

Most peculiar about this was that matter, even solid lead or concrete, was almost transparent to neutrinos: Indeed they may easily pass right through the earth without being noticed. But in spite of the extreme difficulty of actually spotting a neutrino sufficiently large fluxes of them had been produced by nuclear reactors or detected in showers  of  cosmic rays in recent years. Their existence was beyond doubt. Over very short time intervals, an entire subatomic particle could literally disappear from the universe only to reappear again a short while later. Conversely, particles of all types could briefly appear in space and then simply pop away again.

Arthur went to the public library. He asked the librarian for the Schroedinger tapes with the foetal sound waves inside the womb. The librarian, a short, dark-haired man with puffed eyes, had never heard of them. He suggested Arthur consult the photo catalogue. It didn't make sense, but when he filed through it, Arthur found a curriculum vitae of Schroedinger. Meanwhile, he had become the coach of the hockey club of Delft, where he applied the statistical aspects of his studies to increase the performance of his team. Arthur found the phone number mentioned and called him up. Schroedinger was very reluctant to discuss the matter of the cat. He promised, though, to contact him upon his next arrival in Delft. A month later, Arthur would receive a letter of cancellation, stating that a malignant brain tumor had forced Schroedinger to retire from professional life.
When Arthur signed out, the librarian recognized him from the  review of "Secret Sanctions." His name was Lee. He offered to introduce Arthur to Ursula, the video curator of the Delft museum.
 

A close-up of Arthur's face appeared, looking to the right where, in the background, the pavilion silhouetted against the cloud-streaked evening sky above the lake. The stenciled people were still on their knees. Another infant crawled up and touched one of them. A Krell felt someone's throat. Arthur could hear the throbbing of their hearts, accelerating through fear of being detected alive. The Krell let go and shouted across the space: "It's too bad, they won't live!  But then again, who does?"

The earth is a source of noise. Travelling through space far from this planet, the astronaut located Albedo 0.39 with his noise measurement set, as his antenna panned across the planet. The waveform monitors showed an abrupt increase in noise.

Arthur was awakened by the staccato sound of a breaker hammer from the next-door apartment only seconds before the radio alarm went off.  He recognized the announcer from her voice. In the late fifties, she used to be the pin up idol of Delft and was presently running a popular radio series for orphan pets in search of foster parents. He anticipated that she would play a tune for Gina, Lee's dog.
"This song is dedicated to a very special dog named Gina, who has found a home with an equally special person until January 8, when she will have to be exterminated."
He remembered that, he had to call Lee. They arranged for a meeting at the gallery. Then he turned on the television set. Channel 14 showed  a French movie about a star who didn't want her voice to be recorded. The phone rang. It was Ann.
"I finally got ahold of Schroedinger," she said.
"I am watching a movie, and I can't talk to you right now. Besides, I have lost interest in that matter."
She insisted. He switched  over to the speaker phone and tried to turn her volume down. It didn't work. He turned up the volume of the television set. She complained. He tuned her out, and occasionally said: "Yes."
"Say it again."
 "Hm."
He got up to fix himself a drink. They were in a huge building now, a man was being scrutinized  by three Krells who stood on a high scaffolding. Arthur had lost context. He was irritated. Ann still jabbered. He hung up on her and turned the phone ringer to LED. It immediately started flashing.
A corrugated iron door wiped horizontally to a crowded crimson room, illuminated by four rectangular quartz lights, creating an alien atmosphere. A female voice said "Stay there."
The room itself was small.  The people had to stand close to each other as they gathered around the new illusion projector. A strange tension hovered over them, each one being eager to be first to touch the machine. Arthur wanted to leave, when the person next to him started uttering alien gutteral sounds, as though pretending to explain the functioning of the machine in a purposely garbled and coded speech to which all the others listened respectfully, repetitiously consenting with an approving nod or chuckle. The person stepped up to the marker board and started drawing diagrams of absolutely perfect rectangular shapes and straight connecting lines. They seemed to be dialogue boxes and referential links. Once the boxes were drawn and arranged, he hesitated and then went to sit down. He stared at his outlines, oblivious to what the schematic was about.
It was unbearable. Arthur turned around and awoke to the rhythmic snoring of Pamela. He got up and exited to the adjacent kitchen, closing the door behind him. The room was dimly lit. A crowd of people had gathered to watch an elderly man dancing to Roger Daltrey's "Under a Raging Moon." Arthur saw himself observe the scene over his own shoulders. The dance was beautiful. He was the old man.
Arthur left and went to meet Valerie. He told her he wanted to sleep with her. They went to her room. The acrid stench of cat piss made him faint. When he awoke, she had gone. He was holding his penis in his hand, it got limp. He must have just come. He felt strange, like he had taken her with a breaker hammer. Bursts of sentiments and tenderness towards her overwhelmed him. She came back, obviously annoyed and rejecting him.
"I don't like being fucked this way."
He apologized. She had to pick up her husband Boudou at his  little blue house. Arthur's presence immediateley aroused Boudou's suspicions. Valerie ignored his bursts of jealousy and told him that she had just given birth to twins. Arthur stepped out to the front porch. One of the twin babies crawled towards him, stopped at his feet and inflated its head towards his chest, like a filling hot air balloon. The surroundings disappeared. Arthur lost any sense of dimension. They were facing each other.
In a pubescent voice, it uttered, "I hate you, I hate you!"
Then it deflated again, shrinking to a tiny creature, crying helplessly below him. The landscape had changed. The trees had lost their leaves. Their branches reached without motion into the grey sky. He picked up the baby and entered the house again, when he heard a short cry, followed by a thump.
He rushed into the adjacent room. Boudou sat on the sofa, gazing, disturbed, at a bundle of laundry in the corner. Arthur deposited the baby on the floor and lifted the clothes, where he found the other child buried underneath.
Boudou stammered: "I killed him."
The infant, who lay face down, was breathing almost unnoticeably. The timer turned on the TV set. The news update reported that Haley's Comet had changed its orbit.

"How do you imagine extraterrestrials? Green, filiform, flask shaped, fluorescent, transparent, metallic?
The lie is: a negligence, a convenience, an error, a scheme, a treason, a pleasure?
Do you remember your dreams? Never, hardly ever, fragmentarily, sometimes, often, always?
Do you have troubles: making the first step,  recognizing an error, forgiving an offense, breaking up with somebody, subordinating yourself, saying thank you?
In the next twenty years, the world will be changed by: The declining birth rate in the Occident, the industrial robotization, the misery in the Third World, genetic manipulation, the personal computer?
You start declining after: You are born, 14, 20, 40, 60, never?..

They were facing each other. Valerie read questions from a magazine test about a person's historical affinity.
A field of codes belonged to each question with acertain number of black squares and black or white circles, and sometimes only blanks, corresponding to every answer. The epoch was determined by the number of squares. The white dots signified empirical tendencies, the black ones cerebral tendencies.
She wrote down his answers. Schroedinger entered with the paper strips. Valerie passed the questionnaire on to him. He pondered over it for a while. Arthur felt like he was waiting for a verdict.  Finally, Schroedinger stated that there were only few derivations in Arthur's tendencies of answering. The score classified him as a human of the twenty-first century with Goldorak tendencies, with attributes like the alliance of the angel with the computer, of the samurai with the flea, the future engender of the new crusades. But the business of the cat was carefully omitted.

Arthur switched to the early evening in the southern landscape outside Delft. He climbed the stairs to the top of the terraced hill. The museum was in the old chancellery by the church. Tropical plants abounded around artificial ruins and decaying artifacts. He got to the balcony. Leaning against the balustrades he roamed with his eyes over the huge northern pasture towards the west. The great sky spectacle reflected in the flooded meadows. Jagged clouds fanned out from a winged  gray cloud bank across the horizon. The vanishing point started to suck him away from his pulpit. He turned abruptly towards the windows of the house. In their reflection he saw himself trailing as an anamorphic image across the pasture towards the vanishing point. Scared, he focused to the interior. Only now he noticed a middle aged woman in a grey blouse and dirndl skirt, waving at him. She came to open the glass door, introducing herself as Ursula, the video curator of the museum. Arthu  entered quickly. On the floor there were two huge photostats from his Caspar David Friedrich series. She wanted to talk about them. He was unable to utter any coherent sentence, his thoughts escaped unverbalized, drawn through the tunnel behind him into immediate oblivion.
Down below Arthur saw Lee and Gina starting to climb the stairs to the escarpment. Lee seemed to manage only with great difficulty and was panting heavily when he embraced Arthur. His features had changed. His thinning hair was now blond. The eyes had narrowed into two small slits of a tribal mask.

In the church, people had gathered around some artists who announced their forthcoming performance, a trip down the river in a steamboat. During their stops they would go into the villages and inform people about their project. Arthur did not know whether this was already part of the event or merely preparation or fund raising. Involuntarily, he thought of a performer who had crawled up Broadway during Hurricane Gloria, painted in red, wearing just a loincloth. Only now he realized that there had never been any steamboats running on the river or the lake, and looking at the performers again, he noticed their atavistic appearance and use of archaic words. He approached their leader, a tall man in his late-twenties, pale complexion, with sunken cheeks and a slightly ascetic aspect. Arthur inquired very curiously about their origin. The man pretended not to comprehend Arthur's question nor his speculations, but showed him a recent newspaper review of a multi-media installation of his group. He introduced himself as Harry and invited Arthur to join them for a walk.
While they descended down the narrow stairs towards the harbor, they were joined by two young women who obviously knew Harry. Arthur was strongly attracted to the blond woman. He felt his penis becoming erect and drifted off into sexual fantasies about her.  He was riding on the weight of a pendulum, naked, his penis erect.  She was lying at the apex, her legs open wide, her cunt quivering.  Full of excitement Arthur leapt off the bob and plunged into her.
By the time the party had reached the old lighthouse, the sun had started to set behind the lake, casting tiny little rainbow glitters on the oil patches at the shore. Some feet below the surface Arthur distinguished swarms of strange water animals. A tiny winged cat swam above them.
Harry said, "It's dying. Look how wearily it moves its wings. The water is too polluted."
Arthur disagreed, for him the animal was floating gracefully with occasional strong strokes. He looked at the woman. She smiled at him invitingly. When they descended, he took her aside and let the others gain distance. She invited him to her place.
Her bed was next to a window. She asked him what kind of preventive method he used.
"None," he replied.
She mentioned some bizarre product. He understood that it was a spermacide gelatin wafer. She started smiling and touched his erect penis. Arthur grabbed her succulent breasts. She sighed with a mixture of pain and pleasure and stuck his impatient sex into her wet vagina.

Not only did sequence lose its role as a guide to meaning, but the very idea of a correspondence between an event and a single context was torn apart. Each segment became a haunting enigma.

The advertising billboard was on far side of the icerink. Arthur, sitting on a bench, watched the loop of computer generated images. One of them particularly interested him, though later he had a hard time remembering what it looked like. Walking along the boards he got closer to the display which turned out to be unexpectedly immense, impossible to view or describe its entirety. First of all, he noticed the colored layers of paint over the patterned surface, and on closer inspection realized that the structures were in fact drawn with a pencil. An advertisment for the Amiga popped in. He went back to the bench, where he met Pamela. They went for a walk across the pasture towards the dusk, each recounting their seperate attempts of leaving Delft and the lake zone. Arthur looked back. Three Krells followed them. Arthur hadn't dreamt them in quite a while and was astounded to see them on his tracks again. Pamela had never encountered them and was amazed by their wide angle, almost anamorphic appearance. They escaped behind a row of seats, snuck their way out through the checkroom. Through a mirror Arthur could see the Krells still looking for them.
They arrived in Arthur's neighborhood in Delft. A police car was parked in front of his house. Through the commotion he saw the cops removing the stiff bodies of some junkies from the hallway. He stepped out of the car to take a closer look. The bodies were sculpted from paper, beautifully dressed in ragged clothes. The officers handled them with utmost care, as though aware that they were fragile pieces of art. He wanted to touch them, feel whether they had any life and warm substance. He felt Pamela's kneading hand on his cock. He got an erection and immediately ejaculated. Sperm splashed all over her. When he looked to the street again, it was deserted and silent.

Nobody thought of being in a prison. The state of being was in perfectly plottable equilibrium, constantly verified through observation and statistics and the administration of sedative drugs.

That morning Arthur discovered the wound on his wrist. It was purulent. He could not remember having hurt himself. He was afraid of going to sleep again and cut to a doctor's office, where, straight away, he was surrounded by nurses and given injections. His head felt lopsided. The doctor entered, scanned the sore shortly and ordered more shots.
Vehement protests billowed up in Arthur's throat, but the tranquilizers had paralyzed his tongue. Then the first rush of panic subsided, leaving him lethargic. The doctor pulled out a physician's reference from the shelf and quite randomly rushed through the pages. In a very casual manner he finally put it down on the desk. The nurses flocked around him, their attention poised on the open book. Arthur waded towards them, clumsily gesticulating.
"What is your diagnosis?" He implored them.
They turned towards him, the doctor leapt on a chair and hushed the nurses, like the conductor of a female chamber choir who, after a swift sign with his stethoscope, intonated the diagnosis of hysteria tremens and began chanting the product information text for diazepam, dancing around Arthur and ushering him towards the door. He lost himself in a stammer and a muddle.
They entered a staircase. Marginally he noted paramedics carrying the paper bodies from the back street up and down the spiral stairs, which reminded him of an illustration from the collection of perspective studies by DeVries. They ended in a small, Victorian-style attic.
The window facing east gave simultaneous views of two spaces, a cobblestone street in Delft with a windmill in the background, and the intersecting fragments of a residential aerea with lingering residues from a conversation about the rise of crime in the neighborhood.
A young doctor entered the scene. He instantly recognized the situation and started arguing with the med. But by now, Arthur had lost interest in their discourse over maladministered drugs and the ambient  recital choir. Quite sedated, he blurred over to the open left and faded out their voices.
He saw them outside again, retinal afterimages or ghosts, disguised as undercover actors mingling in a movie-set up, still involved in their argument. They pretended to play race riders on wheeled cardboard horses,  drifting across the scenery. Arthur admired the invisible director's obvious ability to seamlessly stage one scene after another in a matrix of endlessly recursive happenings. A 1911 Fiero arriving in the narrow street wiped across the view from the left. Schroedinger was driving, Ann sat next to him. She ignored Arthur. Schroedinger handed him a complimentary admission for two to an ice hockey game in the rink outside Delft later that week.
Arthur thought of inviting Harry to the game. He went to see him at his temporary residence in the "Astoria." He could not find him in his room, so he went down to the lake. Harry was floating in the water.
Some lake people idled around by the shore. Arthur  approached Harry and said: "I have an invitation for the hockey game."
Harry didn't respond, absorbed in his life in the water, walking weightlessly in the fluid, striding away from the shore. Occasionally the back of his head would emerge through the surface. Arthur panned away from the spectacle over the water and spotted Lee, splashing around with other residents of the "Astoria." Arthur got into the water himself. Now he could understand Harry's strange motions. The water constantly changed its consistency from liquid through gelatin to  perfectly solid gound. On occasion he caught a glimpse of Lee. He could not communicate with him, though. Like himself, Lee travelled through the multiple states of the water. But Lee had already arranged each level into playgrounds for himself and his companions. On one of the layers they held a running competition. Each time one of them wafted into this scene, he would execute his consecutive step and almost immediately transfer to the next plane. Meantime, the race would update itself for all the other players, and depending on individual skill and strategy, one would  surface, coinciding with the time for the next move. As a novice, for Arthur it was impossible to coordinate his entries and exits, so he proceeded quite randomly through the ephemeral levels.
He finally found himself waiting on the platform of a subway station. He could not explain how he had managed to stop his passage through this maelstrom, nor did he recall why he should be taking the subway. The train entered the station. It was newly painted, signal orange. Then he recognized a player from the water games in his orange lifevest, his arms stretched out, the hands cautiously approaching the moving sides of the cars. A subway worker ran towards him and yelled that the train was still too fast to touch. When it had slowed down further he demonstrated what seemed to be the right technique of contacting the panels. He moved parallel to the train. When their velocities coincided, he carefully pressed his hands onto one of the panels, slowed down slightly to let the train advance an arm's length, and then very gracefully shifted to a rectangular relation again. The train did not stop, but started accelerating, moving along an immense crowd of passengers that clustered like insects along its side, harmoniously shifting and stabilizing. The subway station was drawn away by some invisible force in the trail of the disappearing train.
Arthur remained alone, seated by a window table in a restaurant. A woman in her forties entered and seated herself at the table to his left. A little while later, Schroedinger appeared in the doorframe. He joined the woman. Another patron, came over to Arthur's table, bringing the news that Alterre had closed its borders.
Meantime, Arthur felt a presence he had not sensed for a long time. It was Pamela, sitting at the outside end of his table. As he listened with plain disinterest to the man gabing on about his theories of the Krells and the annexation of the lake zone, he carefully moved his hand across the table, passed it through the wall, like an insect and very tenderly touched her hand. The two hands began caressing each other.
Arthur had smoked too many cigarettes. The conversation dragged on, he trailed off, looking through the window, panning over to the mirror next to the men's room. He excused himself and got up. Blood rushed up into his head, making him feel dizzy. He hardly made it to the sink before he vomitted. When he looked up to his mirror face, he saw blood spilling from his mouth. He zoomed in to a close-up and pulled his aching lips. They receded and exposed his bleeding teeth and gums. He then remembered Ann mentioning that she had gum problems, whenever she was tired and emotionally upset, and he resented the fact that residues of these words had sneaked into his dream and ultimately would wake him up.
When he cut back to the restaurant, he found Pamela sitting inside at his table. He embraced her. She withdrew and smiled. A tiny seam of blood filled the thin crevice between her upper lateral incisor and the left eyetooth. She told him she'd get married next Monday and then stay in Delft.
It had gotten late. They broke up in a hurry and followed the meandering river towards the peninsula of the lake domain. While climbing over the scattered rocks, obscure recollections swept through his mind and started strobing with perceptions of the passage. Pamela eventually disappeared.
Later that night, Arthur remembered the lucidity of those memory surfs. Their visual content, however, had been washed away and he was unable to salvage any scene or still from the closing layers of oblivion. He raised his left hand to his nose. Pamela's smell permeated his olfactory senses. He inhaled deeply. In the dim light from Delft across the water he caught a glance of the sore on his wrist, which by now spread over most of his forearm.

Harry had moved into the next door apartment. One night, Arthur watched him scan the nocturnal rooftops with a quartz lamp. The scattered light floods transformed them into a small oriental village.
When he awoke in his overheated room he remembered that the adjacent buildings underneath had been torn down to yield to the parking lot. This alteration unsettled him very strongly. He could not account for the exterior agent upon his landscape, invisible adversary in his own dreams. He climbed down to turn off the heat. He did not manage to reach the radiator. It was being pulled away in the wake of the opening walls. Arthur broke into a run. Ahead of him were clusters of running people. He caught up with a woman who was panting up the steep hill, hampered by the cumbersome radiator which she constantly disassembled and reshaped. Arthur offered to help her and took part of the contraption, a square salt container with an alarm clock inside. He passed one runner after another, rapidly approaching the leading group of the race. The road ended abruptly at the shore of the lake. He darted into the water and started swimming. He became a fish, shooting past shoals of other fish towards the nearing shore line. When the waters got shallow, he emerged again as a runner, effortlessly striking across the surface. In his ecstasy he failed to notice the shark just ahead of him, the last opponent in the race. His grey body swirled around, jaws wide open, ready to shred Arthur's legs. Arthur evaded to the left. In the middle of the attack the shark unvoluntarily transformed back into the human contestant again. He decelerated immediately and sank into the water. Arthur crossed the finish line.
The second round of the race started off much harder. Arthur's legs felt like metal appendixes as he struggled up the narrow path towards the insuperable ridge. Glancing down past his weary legs, he saw the rugged ground submerge into the even plane of a concrete floor. He came to a halt inside a basement, flanked by two counters. A black woman sat behind the one to his right. She referred him to the other side. A young man transferred big, golden potatoes from a carton container into a net bag which he finally stitched at the top and then tugged into the adjacent vault, where he disappeared. The black woman had gone. Arthur was alone, surrounded by the labyrinth of counters. Each one of them yielded to secret chambers, open doors to the real world, the closed domain of his dreams. Passing from one to another he felt like a scientist scanning through arrays of microscopes with probes of fantastic species. He was the astronomer,  eavesdropping on the murmur of remote galaxies, the dreamer gazing inside and permeating himself.

Arthur stood in the station, waiting for the train to New York. The train arrived on an unscheduled platform. He broke into a run and hardly caught up with the departing train. He flung his bag inside, forced the pneumatic doors open with both arms and swung himself into the car. He felt a sudden short pain in his ears, like two invisible spring vise grips had snapped around his head. He stepped inside the waggon and found himself a seat by the window. The pain had gone. Inadvertently, he visualized Ibn Ben Gabir, getting a massage. The masseur spattered hot Texas salsa all over his naked fat body. Ibn Ben Gabir quivered with delight, spiced up and kneaded like a living sausage. Arthur watched them with disinterest in their desperate game of pleasure-seeking. He got bored after a while and cut back to Delft.
He stood in front of an old bakery. It had been restored and turned into a gentrified chic cafe with white chairs and tables on the sidewalk. Neighboring it, there was a fancy shoe store. Arthur tried on some of the transparent acrylic designer style shoes. He particularly liked one model with a fake leather flap and metal orthopedic soles. He simply walked off with a pair, leaving his old shoes on the display shelf. In his haste, he had put them on in reverse. At first they felt very comfortable, and only after quite some time walking towards the steep stairs up to the church on the hill did they begin to impose their awkward fit on his feet, the pain spreading along the sides of his body up to his head. Again, the pressure of the vise grew unbearable and the screw jaws slowly tightened like a shrinking metal mold. He envisioned the sutures of his skull bursting like icebergs in a Friedrich painting. He stripped off the shoes, put them on properly, and immediately the pain ceased.
Arthur climbed the escarpment past the 3D liquid crystal advertisement for a local gospel group. Approaching the old chancellery, he was escorted by the holographic images of the singers, ethereal pilgrims on a conveyer belt. He could not distinguish anymore whether he was really stepping forward, or if in fact the buildings moved towards him, like the sets in a haunted house. He gazed at the zooming scenery, confused by the multitudinous levels of perception. Each glance seemed to evoke memories about other dreams, occurences in daily life, which by themselves were again metaphores for endless maelstroms of yet-undiscovered realities.
The specters emanated from the medieval church. Arthur entered through the central portal. People inside were involved in the sacred activity of producing illusions. He sat down on one of the pews and started spacing out. He found himself mounting a spiral staircase in the back of the nave, surrounded by fans of semiclosed apsidal chapels. During his climb he caught glimpses of their interiors, fragments of women, assembled from Beckmann paintings, fucked or just imagined in solitary masturbation, disjointed from any actual person: tits, crutches, legs, abdomens, silicone implants, lips, hands around his penis, pure elements of abstract ecstasy pasted into every conceivable space, into tunnels, deserts and oases, secret cities, gloomy bars, shores of mythological countries. Arthur ascended weightlessly through the midst of them all.
In the blink of an eye he witnessed the rise and fall of a Lotto millionaire, ruined by scams and misspeculations. Arthur cut to a halt and gravitated into the hospital room. The millionaire lay hardwired to an iron lung, a cybernetic organism, wheezing, brownish slime oozing rhythmically over his lips. Occasionally he fell into sudden convulsions which reverberated pleadingly through the tubes.
Arthur stepped out to the veranda. He looked over the landscape. Man-powered gliders presented a unique spectacle of daring acrobatics in the sky. In a sudden premonition of death, he backed up and, only instants later, one of the gliders crashed down on the concrete, blood splashing all over, liquid red debris of the exploded pilot.

Experience of events past happened with the immediacy of the present; remembering was constant acquiring from the future. Because of fluctuations in time and space, the different lives were not symmetrically opposed. People that existed in one continuum didn't necessarily exist in another.

Arthur was lying in his loft bed, semi-awake. Schroedinger's cat had appeared by the east window; its eyes scanned over the picture of Delft. A red balloon on a string popped into existence. It corresponded precisely to the movement of Arthur's eyes. He could make it pan across the room, dance up and down. Wherever he looked, it would appear immediately. When he closed his eyes, its afterimage glowed through the darkness in his retina. After a while he got skilled enough to guide it through the room, even sling its string around the cat and lift it. With his eyes still closed, he directed it together with its freight through the open window and let it sail towards Delft.

Arthur felt an ache in one of his lower right molar teeth. With the tip of his tongue he touched the soft and spongy gums around the loose tooth. With a little force he would be able to push it out of its roots and lose it forever. He inspected it at the mirror, opening his mouth and pulling down the lip. The gums were inflamed and had receded, exposing the marred tooth. He magnified the image until it looked like an illustration photograph in a dentistry textbook and thus lost any direct connection with his own mouth or the progressing decay of his teeth. Subsequently it dissolved into a scene from his father's youth. Arthur had just met him through an ad in the papers of his latest obscure invention which finally turned out to be a new process for manufacturing dehydrated soup. They walked by an idle rivulet down a small hill towards the lake domain, the setting of Arthur's own childhood in the dream. Clots of green algae covered the still and shallow puddles that fanned around the small vein of running water. It was there that his father had hit upon his invention: through devising a set of silicon filters which retained the algae, he obtained pure drinking water. The weed was then removed from the filter panels and its essence extracted, dried and seasoned in the little manufacturing plant by the lake. When he demonstrated the preparation of the powder, Arthur thought of the grandfather, packaging analgesic suppositories in the basement of the old pharmacy, where he had spent the last years of his life. In real life, his grandmother died the same day in the nursery home in Delft, February 21, 1986.
Arthur remembered a birthday visit to his grandfather. It had been after a video shoot in the old schoolhouse of Delft, documenting the transition process of a class after the change of the teacher. Arthur marveled at the beautiful machines, which the predecessor had constructed with the kids. One of them was a real animation projector. A girl enthusiastically opened the cardboard cover and demonstrated to him the delicate architecture of the interior. A myriad of strings manipulated the stencils and figures over the different planes which all seemed to create their own light.
Arthur watched the spectacle and  discovered himself inside, sitting naked  with the girl in front of a prism block or pavilion, at this very moment ostensibly also confronted with his unexpected Doppelgaenger. He swirled around and looked up and for a split second only, Arthur glanced at Arthur. The girl's hand moving up his leg and his arousal cancelled his contact with this parallel person or specter. She bent over to his lap and inserted his penis into her young mouth. Excited, Arthur grabbed her around the waist, rolled on his back and pulled her close and slipped right into her. They fantasized that they were riding speed bikes down the mountain road to his grandfather's house. They would lean into the narrow curves and be only fractions of an inch away from the rapidly moving hard concrete road and then tilt up again, screeming with excitement and lust.
When they arrived at the house, the party was already in full swing. The grandfather jammed on a sitar. Painted with gold color, he looked like a radiating mummy. The guests entertained themselves by spackling up cracks in the walls and the floor with metallic compounds that sparkled liked crystalls in the strobing light. Arthur recognized some of them vaguelywith a slight, yet undefined uneasiness from spatiotemporal events past.
The girl exclaimed, "The smoke machine!"
And soon enough, the place was veiled in billows of aromatic fumes, the ejaculating semen of Arthur. The grandfather seemed to float away like a transparent apparition in the fog of a movie, plucking one of the Goldberg Variations on the strings of his instrument. The scene slowly subsided. The tune still lingered on in his head as he rubbed his sweating body against the girl. They laughed and again directed their attention towards the optical apparatus.
In a sudden flash Arthur was submerged in vivid recollections of having murdered a woman years ago, a forgotten crime he had repressed deep in his subconsciousness. The murder had been incidental. He met the woman before the exodus from the lake zone. One day, while swimming in the river, he caught up with her, floating unsuspectingly in the fast waters. Of all the random interactions and happenings possible, he simply drowned her, keeping her under water while the violent currents flushed them downstream. She died without struggling, like it was the most probable thing to happen to her, there and then. Arthur abandoned the submerged body. From the embankment he watched her surface and drift towards the river delta. The subsequent investigations concluded that her death had been accidental, the result of a cramp or loss of consciousness after hitting a rock. The only person suspecting a crime had been her husband. In a flash it occured to him, that this husband had been among the unidentified guests, and Arthur also recognized him as the anonymous silhouette on the bench during the pixel storm.
The sudden confused expression of the girl directed his attention towards the door. In the doorway stood the husband, accompanied by two Krells.
He said: "I have a witness now. I can prove that you are guilty. There is no way out. You are trapped. Surrender!"
The Krells gestured for him to get dressed. They solemnly entered the cabinet and advanced through the tangle of strings. Arthur waited another instant and then leapt into the prism block. The collision rendered him unconscious, just long enough to delete the magical projector that had usurped his memory with this alien event and to distance the Krells again.
Arthur cut to the lake domain. A rumor had spread that the Krells would annex the little zone that day. For weeks now, Krells had been sighted at the border, evidence that their territory had been under surveillance. Harry feared a gruesome invasion. While pretending not to notice any activities at the border by seemingly pursuing their daily business, the inhabitants secretly arranged their departure from the estate with the people from the steamboat who had scheduled for this day their weekly fundraiser for their Moebius journey on the river.

Arthur joined Harry on the lighthouse tower. They peered down at the membranous border of the lake estate and Alterre, where already the osmotic invasion of the Krells and their fictitious blank reality had begun. Arthur could see them filtering through, small phalanxes in a transparent labyrinth with their black uniforms, carrying black executive cases.
He observed their drill for a while. They functioned like fluids, unquestioningly obeying the laws of osmosis, percolating through the porous partitions of the layers and cells of different realities, rendering everything bleakly homogenous. Meanwhile, the boat had arrived at the pier and the inhabitants furtively got aboard.  Harry gestured Arthur to leave, and together they embarked unnoticed by the invading Krells.
In the daytime they each traveled their separate ways, not knowing whether they would meet again on the boat or on another space in the reality of their dreams.
Arthur got stranded in some remote jungle. There were moments when his past came back to him, in the shape of a restless and noisy dream, among the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants and water, and silence, the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. He could sense it looking at him with a vengeful aspect. Seized with sudden fear, he grabbed a branch of a tree and hoisted himself up. While he was climbing higher for shelter, he noticed that the landscape was defoliating, the leaves dissolving away like green specters, fading sparks of a luscious firework. He almost neglected to catch a last glimpse of two lions fading out in a their pathetic attempt to climb the tree. Arthur continued on his ascent and quite unexpectedly arrived in a tree cafe. He sat down on a chair and scanned the defoliated landscape. The branches and twigs formed a bizarre greyish capillary zone between the sky and the earth. Subdued voices percolated into his ears. Other patrons were present in the cafe. He looked around and recognized some members of a dance group with which he had once collaborated. They leaned against the railing on the far side of the veranda. He went over to join them. They were amazed to see him here with the other refugees on the boat. The rumour of their escape had already started to spread throughout the infinite planes of reality. Down, far below, Arthur saw the river and the net of canals, threading through the dead forest. One of the dancers handed him a set of opera glasses. Arthur detected the boat moored near a clearing with a tubular building. There he hoped to join the voyagers again. The railing yielded, the platform receded and he was up in the air, once again flying.  He glided over the barren trees and soon arrived above the clearing. While descending in a volute, he noticed a repudiating and yet sweet smell coming from the building. The net of canals which spread from the delapidated pavilion was filled with sewage and soft debris. The pavilion itself was smeared with layers of dirt. The copper patina underneath sparkled like emerald stones amidst the mottled pattern of brownish tints. The people had gathered outside the house to watch Arthur's arrival from the sky. They stood there naked, equally covered with dirt, as though to camouflage themselves and unite with the strangely beautiful domain of puss, vomit and excrements. They were the same group of pilgrims he had encountered here, when he had first visited the place. He now remembered that he had regurgitated then, the act of planting a seedling, which in the meantime had grown and multplied and immersed the entire area into a soft and warm cankerous tissue, fertilizing grounds for the rebirth of the forest. Arthur landed with a splash and went under.
As he dived deeper, the temperature around him chilled and the pasty layers gradually liquified. With energetic strokes he glided towards fluid dome above him, radiating in the strong light of the sun. He cut through the surface and emerged near the idly oscillating float. He climbed the little ladder to the deck, then dived back into the water again and began swimming towards the pavilion. The boat was still anchored at the pier.
There were still people leaving the lake domain. By now the exodus involved crowds from the thirties and forties. Everybody from Arthur's own area must have already left. He was amazed to detect himself among the embarking people, together with Boudou and Valerie on the gangplank. Later, he  would marginally recollect the presence of a video crew.

Valerie told him that he had been chosen as honorary member of the official Honeymooner fan club, but his attention got caught by a young long haired woman next to him, apparently from the late sixties. She put her hand under his shirt and gently moved it up his back, pulling herself closer to him. He touched her skin and started to caress her. They embraced and while sliding unhampered through the dissolving bulwark, he caught a glimpse of her face, all obscured by passionate ecstasy. For a split second he remembered her being somebody he knew from his school days. She had committed suicide several years ago. The circumstances of her death had remained mysterious. At the funeral some marginal figures wore clothes they had long since outgrown. But almost instantly that recollection merged with the raging waves of unleashed violent memories. Then she was gone. People were looking over the rail as Arthur waded towards the shore.
A voice addressed him through a megaphone: "Your presentation is on next!"
Arthur was completely unprepared. He wondered, where he had set himself up for this event.
The performance space was inside the big ballroom on the deck. When Arthur entered, the stage lights were turned on and inserted their bright cone into the black, a big synthesizer and a keyboardist became visible. The floor opened and the person slowly descended and then disappeared.
The deserted stage was L-shaped, littered with dust-covered requisites which seemed to have been dormant for centuries, waiting to be awakened under Arthur's direction.  He stepped up to the electronic music instrument, blew the dust off and turned on the power switch. Then he set the machine to autoplay. With a slow attack it gradually rose to its peak in a full orchestral sound. He saw little ripples in the layers of dust change to waves sweeping through the room, turning into a storm of dust, driven by the rising music.
The lockers sprang open, the light of the sun, of four suns, flooded inside, transforming the space into the sublime world of Turner with specters of steam trains, houses on fire, cataclysms of transparent memories. Staccatos of jackhammers and shattered piano tunes from "Rhapsody in Blue" orchestrated the phantasmal spectacle. And then, suddenly, the concert was over, silence, five seconds at least, before the passengers behind the windows blurted into screems of exaltation. The billows of dust slowly settled again to a thick layer of surface coating.
Arthur was covered with dust as he exited backstage to the lobby of a small theater. The box office was right in front of him. Out of curiosity, he was about to  purchase a ticket when he suddenly realized that, in fact, he had a free pass to the show in his jacket. Involuntarily, he remembered a strange occurence during his recent visit to Delft. Walking towards the end of the narrow cobblestone shopping street, he had heard a creaking noise. Looking up, he saw the splintered sails of a windmill turning. Tilting down again, he focused on a woman, bleeding and wrapped up in torn bandages. She stood right in the orbit. The blades would crash into her. Each time, the impact made her shudder a bit, for a short time the windmill stagnated, and slowly crept past her, ripping off pieces of flesh and bandage and then resumed its spin again. She beckoned Arthur to come over and handed him the complimentary admission for tonight's event, the premiere of Yoko Ono's latest performance work. Arthur entered the small space. The audience was sparse. He sat down in the middle row. The lights went out, darkness, and then glowing bull's eyes were being lowered in front of every spectator. They showed fragmented  holographic recordings of the siege of the lake estate and the escape of the people with the boat. The last one to embark was Harry. He zoomed in on his hand, followed it moving up to the blue sky, where it wrote: "No success in Astoria."
A hand, tapping on his left shoulder, tore Arthur out of his gazing into the magical theater. He turned his head to the left and saw Boudou sitting next to him, pointing with consternation to his own screen.
He whispered: "I' ve got bumble bees buzzing all over my picture."
Arthur leaned over and peered into Boudou's set. It was swarming with insects, emanating  a particular stench, he had not smelled in a long time. It brought up memories of a car ride with an aging opera singer to Alterre, when the borders were still open for visitors of the upstream dismal vast plains  and cuboid cities of the Krells. Periodically, she would brake into singing little librettos, emitting the most painful strident utterings, orchestrated with billows of bad breath.
Arthur cut to the spiral staircase in the church and drifted for a while through the converging planes of pictorial realities. Outside a 17th century Dutch interior he ran into Pamela. She was hot. She rubbed her tits against Arthur. He got a hard on. His penis popped out of his fly. The blue veins, bursting with blood, were  climbing like vines around the shaft. She massaged it with pulling movements.
"I want to make it longer," she said. "You know, it doesn't quite reach all the way up."
Arthur wondered what she meant by "all the way up."
They snuck into the delapidated courtyard and fucked. In the meantime, Harry had entered the ruins, guiding a group of tourists.

The annexation had happened unexpectedly, almost unnoticeably at first, like the incubation of a deadly virus, and then spreaded exponentially. He probably wouldn't find or recognize  Delft and the lake domain, and since the invaders had not updated the map, it might not even be there anymore.

The Delft Museum invited Arthur for a presentation of "Secret Sanctions" with an installation on the pier in the lake domain. In the pavilion he found a needle, with wich he engraved the installation diagram into a kneadable eraser. Very carefully, he pleaded the rubber and slided it into his breast pocket.
It was late, and on his way towards Delft he got lost in the labyrinth of  marshy foot paths through the fields of reed, that were rotting into mud, along the banks of the distributaries, whose waters, thickened into slime, invaded the contorted undergrowth, that seemed to writhe at him in the extremity of an impotent despair. It was like a weary pilgrimage through a string of nightmares. Eventually, he encountered a fat, young  indigene. He pulled out a customs officer's  badge.  When Arthur asked him for the way to Delft, he produced a map and pointed to the highlit sector of Delft and the vicinal domains. He went on, explaining the topography of the mountain territory, that, because of the absence of bowls, there were no lakes, only marsh. In a flash, it occured to Arthur, that he must  refer to another Delft, on another spatio-temporal plane. The officer noticed his absentmindedness, his eyes roaming suspiciously across him. Then he detected the video cassette.
"Dreams?" he asked jovially.
The customs regulations ruled that video tapes had to be viewed for their relatedness to real life in the happening world before being admitted for import. On their way to the customs house, he reminiscened with exaggerated conviviality about a confiscated surveillance tape, which showed the bearer shooting a shop assistant during his attempt to rob a shoe store. They entered an antechamber, where he seated Arthur at a desk. He handed him a questionnaire, filled  with  images of heterosexual and gay depictions. While he riddled over some stills from "Hunting Scenes in Lower Bavaria", he envisioned some cut away memories across the lake estate. He discovered a set of crosses, made of crude sticks, protruding from the still water, dark orientation signs towards Delft. The images became vivid, Arthur slowly submerged. Drifting by the first cross, he noticed the dissolving cadaver of a baby, shoals of eels feeding on it. Disgusted, he swam back towards the surface. While panning the shore, Arthur could see the officer wading through the water, among hundreds of other Krells, all dressed in lackluster polyester suits, carrying black executive cases, dark cells slowly percolating into the darkness of the evening water.
Arthur turned off the warm rains of water and hastily jumped out of the shower. While drying himself, he remembered his video presentation on the pier. He took out the eraser with the installation diagram from his pocket. He carefully unfolded the onion sized lump to various legal sized rectangles, but the diagrams of the installation, he had so carefully carved out of the soft matter were irretrievably lost.

Probability distributions propagated through space, changing from point to point their wave functions, which causally determined probabilities and properties of certain occurencies, but  they could not  predict with certainty their outcome.

Arthur cut a big glass sheet into rectangular segments, which he then joined with strips and installed in front of the large eastern window like Venetian blinds. The sight of an old synagogue intercut with stripes of reflections from a patch of thinly growing grass on a sandy bluff. A series of  pounding bursts,  the wall caved in, Harry stood in the gap, firmly holding a breaker hammer. He invited Arthur to step over to his newly furnished place.The walls were partitions made of a brownish moire patterned fabric with holes spattered across the surface. Captions of  guests talking, sifted through every wall. Harry crossed the living room with big strides, back and forth, seemingly unsettled by the noise infiltration from his own guests. One of the walls opened like a folding screen, and Schroedinger appeared with the computer strips in the opening, hesitating momentarily, as though to disclose the encoded contents of his scroll, but then he ventured without further regards through the space and disappeared in the bathroom. Quite  appaled, Harry sank down on the floor and started wailing. At that moment, all the walls folded open and in no time at all, the room was crowded with people, congratulating their host about the Venetian blinds. Harry was shattered.
Arthur had to leave. He sliced himself through the blinds and stepped up the dune. On the ridge he caught a view of the long coastline. The beach was crowded with thousands of pregnant women, squatting on circular nests, all facing the horizon. Some were in labor, convulsing soft statues under the burning sun of this late June day. Countless babies crawled inside this jungle of breeding flesh and small electric appliances, solar powered mini fridges, microwave ovens, radios, portable television sets, and cordless telephones.

Arthur walked on the path along the reeds and got to the little harbor. Wild dogs strayed through the abandoned buildings and decaying sites. Birds inhabited the ruins. Early in the morning their cries rouse to an unbearable haunting noise that would pervade the area until late in the evening. The moorings were dilapidated, the fragmented landings padded with mats of green weed, lush bars in the dull, poisoneous breakwater.There was no trace left of either the lighthouse, the pavilion, or the float.
Arthur heard giggling voices behind him. He turned around and saw a long trail of tourists following him. Among them, he saw Harry emerging and catching up with him. His  features had grown younger, very androgynous. The encounter was detached and informal, the walk towards the "Astoria" endured in almost hostile silence.  Emigrants from the turn of the century were squatting the hotel, while waiting to embark on the ship. Arthur remarked the brooding mood of anxiety as they entered the lobby.
He exused himself from the estranged companion and went towards the men's room, but he urinated unvoluntarily against one of the spires on the sides of the corridor, his fluid dripping down the openings to the myriads of lower floors. Feeling sick and nauseated, he collapsed in a lounge chair, facing two women at the bar. He imagined them coming over and giving him a blow job. They arranged a date later that day.
Arthur went to his room. On his way upstairs, one of the orthopedic metal shoesoles broke. He looked at the elegantly crafted plate. He failed in his attempt to put it back on to the shoe again, because the sockets inside the heelbase where the fastening screws had been anchored,  were ripped out. A squatter came over with a manual drill. But the bit perforated the outsole. Arthur lost interest in the repair and went on in his socks. Regardlessly, the person continued drilling decorative holes into the shoes, ignoring the alerting cries from the lobby. The "Astoria" was raided. Arthur escaped outside through an open window. He balanced along the cornice towards a lower parapet. He ventured a leap down and landed on a mat of Astor turf. He reentered into the corridor on his floor. He encountered a group of solemn majorettes, lined up against the walls to his left and right. They ostensibly ignored him, but as he passed by them, their legs snapped up alternatingly, closing teeth of a zipper, puncturing his skin. Tiny stains of blood exploded all over through his cut clothes. Traumatized, he dashed into his old room.
Cardboard boxes, filled with industrial rejects, crowded the space, oversized model towers of some urban developper. As Arthur moved through the narrow valleys, he could hear rustling sounds from inside the containers, material being shifted and rearranged. Metal rods pierced through the sidings, pistils and stamens of a giant robot venus fly trap, constructed by an avid reader of the Scientific American's amateur scientist column. The overhead lighting cast big long shadows down the narrow tunnels, the setting for an expressionist theater or movie.
At some intersection, Arthur ran into Beuys. He was wrapped in felt cloth. He was amazed to see Arthur intrude into his post mortem performance environment. The material movements were caused by mice, bred through genetic manipulation. Beuys opened one of the boxes. Immediately,  a sawblade kind of plastic lamina started pushing towards the rim and a mouse emerged, carefully climbing towards the edge, towards Arthur. In a flash, he grabbed the blade and flung the shrieking rodent to the floor. With a quick move it evaded his decapitating blow. Arthur jumped up to a dike, a knight duelling a mouse, a mere illusion conjured up by the Krells. The mouse bit him, its infectious teeth incising into his feet and legs. In pain, he turned around, opened his eyes and cut from the internal scene of nightmare to the outside retinal image of Delft through the Venetian Blinds.
Someone had covered the facades with tiles in the creamy brown moiree pattern of the wall fabrics of Harry's apartment. In the backroom he detected the cat, tattered and blind. With a scared leap, it escaped through the slats of the blinds, leaving behind the brooding reek of putrescent meat.
Disgusted and weary, Arthur blurred outside, rotating ninety degrees, and came to a halt on the non-skid slabs.
One of the windows nearby opened, a manhole in the tiled surface. The mouse emerged, inflating into a black Great Dane, held in leash by a Krell. Arthur took a leap up to the landing of the fire escape, but neither the dog nor the Krell paid any attention to him, but passed right by him. The  rotated  facade dissolved into a marshy field around him, the man had disappeared, and as he panned around, he saw the Dane fucking with a woman. He zoomed in on her face and saw it change to that of another dog. The Krell pulled out a gun and aimed into the panting mouth of the bitch and shot. A stream of blood from her left ear tinted the landscape crimson red,  as she collapsed in step motion, transformed into the caving pavilion, flooded by the light of a setting sun, coarse animation of a dying entity.
Arthur inhaled the sweet scent of excrements and rotting flesh, the smell from his own body, now that gangrene had set in. Hurting, still in his torn clothes and without shoes, he was standing in shivers above the threshold to the domain of the lake. He let himself fall from the fire escape and submerged into the drainings of decay. Sinking along the pendentives of the pavilion, he passed the slain woman from his schooldays. She was still wearing the blue mini skirt, that used to expose her cunt to Arthur's curious glimpses from underneath the desk. They conversed with speech balloons, sexual onomatopoeias under the slowly crystallizing light dome of the surface above. They kissed and petted, surfacing and submerging. But she was dry and Arthur could not penetrate her. The lake was stormy, strong undercurrent  drew them down the lake towards the icerink where tthey let go of each other. An instant later, they were separated.
Arthur stroke out towards the shore. The riverboat was anchored to his left. Overwhelmed with joy, he imagined that, finally, all of his companions and the other refugees would be reunited for the game, and as he heard Harry's voice through the megaphone, calling him into the rink to play, he knew, he would remain in the zone of Delft, the lake and the river, part of the eternal spectacle of Harry and his group. Wading ashore, he pictured himself wearing a player's costume, and step by step materialized a pair of skates, pants and pads, gloves, a helmet and a stick. He jumped the sideboards and slided with big strides to the center circle. The referee dropped the puck, Arthur hit it with the blade, it shot across the immaculate ice surface towards the far backboards and tracked along the curve behind the deserted goal.
Arthur witnessed his collapse like a noisy slow motion playback, zooming in on the screen of ice. There was a loud thud as he collided with the grainy silhouette on the impenetrable white surface, reverberating inside his ears, then silence. He was already dead, when the helicopter with the video crew pulled away from the icerink in a voluted pan. Strapped to the hoist outside was Harry, operating the camera with the gyro zoomlens and taking a perfectly stable picture of the receeding white rink and the dead player on the red and white center line.