The trope had just awakened, and now sat frightened on a bed in a moderately priced lunar hotel room. The trope was just a trifle more male than female. He was a blank persona, like an uncut key, flesh-colored like a department store mannequin, but his surfaces rippled liquid and gracefully when he moved.

The sun rose across smoky windows and pooled in a dusty beam that penetrated into the shadowy chamber.

The trope sat with hands folded between his knees, as if deep in thought, with shoulders and head slightly slumped. Hairless, naked, lithe, he sat with a grill of faint citron light falling on his milky chest and androgyne face through Venetian blinds.

Some dilemma needed urgent resolution. He couldn't be sure what. He felt he might grow into the answer, so he waited and did the things his instinct told him he must.

The room had texture, rather than color, much like the trope himself. Or rather, the texture was simple, like smears of oatmeal. The shapes in the room, unlike the trope's subtle and sophisticated lines, were equally simple: a cube containing rectangles (window, bed) and a pyramid (vase) and lines (Venetian).

A sphere (bowl) containing crackers.

The trope reached out with oatmeal fingers and took a cracker. Breaking it, he put the halves in his mouth, awkwardly, first the left and then immediately the right, holding his hands over his mouth so the pieces would not fall out. It was the first thing he ate.

As he ate, tiny circuits in the crackers sparked and crackled like distant fireworks, and flowers appeared in the vase: complex petals, lipstick rouge, on curving green stems.

The trope ate cracker after cracker, and the room filled with color and sound as he learned. The trope had hungry little white teeth and groaned as his squarish jaws worked. He smelled faintly of licorice and bad breath and sea anemones. The hemispheres of his skull became covered in pastel countries with little black names, like a child's globe. Then glossy black hair grew like a jungle and covered the countries. He spied a mauve thread of wool on the wood slat floor and bent to pick it up. His breath hissed faintly like steam as he moved, and water dripped from his nostrils onto the floor. He swept his hairs back into a ponytail tied with the thread.

As the cracker bowl emptied, music filled the room: distant, gentle, insistent, urgent. He rose on bare china feet and padded to the window. Raising the blinds, he looked out over a lunar landscape seen through plate glass. He understood how it would be to be a fish in a bowl of aerosphere, of atmos/sphere. As he leaned against the window frame, he finished the last cracker and dusted his hands off. The bowl, devoid of crackers, shattered into pearly dust that blew through the room, reassembling against the trope's groin like an Egyptian loincloth.

At the same time, the wall opposite the window, above the bed, grew a large, vague woman's smile. As he looked at the smile, the context filled in and he thought he could make out the faint dimples in her jaw, the roundness and mystery of her cheekbones, the declination of her closed eyes. Was she daydreaming? Did she know him? It was his first longing. He felt the urge of its gentle pain and the ache in its candy. He felt in his loins that he must loinniol, although he must first learn what that meant. It was inscribed on his innermost tunnels, his deepest octaves, his darkest chord groupings, in an ink made of greenish light and rising, curving, erect like the head of a hammerhead shark.

The trope looked out over the lunar landscape as a smoothly detailed toy train passed. Its planes were ivory, its corners stainless steel, its windows chrome, its roof rainbow-mango. The tracks were white and black like piano keys.

The trope picked up the bed and threw it through the window. The window shattered, letting in noise and air. History crept in like a cloud smelling of wet grass, and filled with splattering rain stacked in skyscrapers of sound. The baths of Caracalla. The basilica of Assisi. Union Station wreathed in high thin autumn light and glowering cigarette smoke. The trope stepped carefully over the shattered glass and strode away on long clean bluish limbs. His hips were narrow and masculine, his buttocks small, his shoulders wide. His eyes were blue like a morning rain, like air in a jar, like a dog barking, a window rattling, a train passing, a girl laughing on her way to the store to buy milk. A newspaper. A paperclip. A guitar pick. A lingerie ad.

The air smelled like laundry and apples and tar and earth. And grass. The trope held his head in creaking steel fingers and made an anguished groaning sound at the overload, while melons rolled down his taste buds and the back of his nose filled with the smells of fresh paint and turpentine with a sprig of mint.

This is, actually, where the trope opens his eyes. He sits on a kind of oak techno-throne opposite the Kapellmeister, who raises his staff causing a row of musicians along the wall to run their bows over their violas producing a flourish like broken nutshells scraping on a slate roof. "Thank you!" says the Kapellmeister, bowing slightly. He is a carbuncular man with a huge black wig full of ribbons, an ornate blue and brown leather coat scented with onion, and brown silk knee breeches with mud in the knee-folds, mud that smell of rainwater and horse droppings, not to mention goat urine. It is, after all, the Court of the Sun King.

The squirrel cannot run fast enough when the rossignol dives toward its new nest with a twig and a leaf in its beak, and Zephyrus blows with cheeks as round as the apples in the fall cellar, for whoever doesn't now have a house will not have time to build one. The sadness of that cider settles deep in the trope's glass and he wishes he were a ferry crossing the Mersey, a dove fluttering around the Laterano, a zinc hussar goose-stepping in the Zwecker clock turm, a chestnut roasting on a grill outside the Opera, a long-nailed Mandarin contemplating his autumn garden.

The ladies clap gaily. The crowd smells of ribbons and pomade and brandy and fear. The men have green tumors that must be bled by jesters three times daily, with horn lancets ground under the glass of a full moon on some South Atlantic isle. The women contain oceans boiling with sharks that attack them with stealth, eating their organs so that the alleys of their veins are paved black in grisly moonlight. Their wigs contain soiled ribbons half unraveled in a rage of coupling dominoes. The game is on, the clock clacking as sand falls through glass portals in a vast cupboard made of every wood known on earth, whose surfaces are Versailles itself with rainy cobblestones and brooding windows where a chevalier briefly raises his horse and sword to the sky and darts with circling plume. In that sponge of amber light and oiled wood, the trope spins his eyes on albumin marble smoked with cocoa whirls, cruel lapis devices, lazy lazuli reflections, somber brooding lakes of glass, crystal legions, shadows full of the echoes of last night's minuets, laughter dusting the leaded cracks, even the king's ebony and mahogany and mambo jungle music paddle-wheeled from deepest Astrud. Her plaintive cloth polishes the brass hinges of trick doors, the lintels and capitals, the twists and turns of Pompeiian curtains made of walnut and draped over oaken pine cones in the shadowy land between mouse and forgotten powder horn.

The trope, on the other hand, smells of oranges and tobacco. He looks like a very young handsome and dashing cream of wheat Neptune without the beard and seaweed. No trident, just the loincloth and glass heels.

"Meistervoll!" says the king from his throne, raising a monocle to his brow. "Bravo," sings the tinkling queen opening the myrtle-garlanded curtains of her klo.

But the sergeant at arms lets in a crowd of peasants carrying torches, who have wandered up the long pavestone paths, the Carpathian cloudways, muttering and shouting in their grief and rage. Where is the little girl, the older boy, the village clock with its forlorn underwater chime that used to ring from valley to valley? Where are the ivory and ebony jazz keys of the pious piano, the holy harpsichord, the onanistic organum, the solemn canticles of the clavichord?

The hall empties, leaving only the dangerous air to blow through broken windows and stir dying Zoroastrian flames on starry brass plates. The crowd sweeps in with torches and scythes, howling in grief and rage.

The trope is the only one left in the room. He faces them bravely, but they start to tear at his flesh. He cannot speak, and so he whistles like a tea kettle and promises them...

No, it happened differently.

"A fine metronome," said the Kapellmeister, sitting with a silk-stockinged leg crossed over the other knee while his staff tapped brass measures on a black and white tiled floor.

"Where does he go when he is sleeping?" asked a foppish man holding a periwinkle to his nose.

"To the future? The past?" said the maker, "to a perfect world someplace, we can't know. Some place as mysterious as the sands of Arabia or the great forests of Amazonia."

"A place of mathematical perfection," the encyclopedist insisted. "Where geometry and planes of light are as real as the very walls we inhabit in our own wretched reality."

The girl in the baby-blue dress tittered as she held a hankie to her nose. "What good is he?"

"He will play us a fine Euterpian chord or two," the Kapellmeister boomed proudly. "Those fine fingers made by armorers in scrolled silver and gilded palladium will roll over the harpsichord keys like the waves that birthed Venus."

"It's not a question of what good is he," said the encyclopedist thunderously. "What good is a baby? It is like God in the Garden of Eden. He made man and then seemed to have no special use for us. Now we have made this homunculus and can put him to a thousand uses."

"Or throw him from a tower," said the evil little nephew picking his nose between glowering eyes.

A door opened and a messenger leaned in with worried eyes. "Your lordship, the mob is barely an hour's ride away."

"Then the musketeers were unable to stop them?" the king said in sad resignation.

"They may have defected to the other side. The entire situation is fluid, Majesty."

In minutes, the courtyard filled with dancing men with lanterns. They wore blue breeches and black tricorner hats and waved lanterns that left yellow zigzags in the night air. The trope smelled smoke and wheat as they wrapped him in a blanket and hurried him out a side gate with the girls. Several coaches stood waiting, their horses snorting panicky nostrils and eyes like pure eggs of terror. A hard ride, black rivers, smoke in the churches, deep songs in the square, torches, this was the royal fate though the king's ancestor dwelt in a smoke of incense on marble dinner tables.

"Really," said the encyclopedist, holding one nostril shut with a red fingertip as the coach lurched violently.

"Indeed. He is a creature of pure joy, the quiet encomium of study and meditation. In his veins sings the music of geometry, the dance of Euclid, the hypnotic chant of the Archimedians. He is the happiness of the smiling moon, the peace of a cloudless night, the owl in the rooftops, the child in the window, the breath of the green river in its mother's starched apron. A happy Hermete."

"But what you did to construct him, Faber! No wonder the mob wants to crucify the king."

"All trifles, my dear fellow. Truffles. Trifles. Hogsnort. The mob will always rise and burn the temples. They will always storm the ziggurat. They live in fear of the lion who prowls the palace guarding the king's scrolls. They hate what they fear, so basta—there you have it."

"There we have it."

The coach lurched violently, and the ladies cried in fear and pain as they bruised their ribs, awkward chinoiserie that they were to begin with in their tight corsets, dainty fingers, and overflowing marzipan clouds. A harem of grace notes.

The Kapellmeister leaned forward on his baton and spoke sharply to the trope as if to a stupid child. "You don't understand, do you, for all your perfection? There was once a market square in which was a fountain, and near that a rather elegant doorway in which money lenders in silk turbans counted their coins and waited for customers. One such customer came, and the money lenders surrounded him with their offers. He had torn stockings and needed the money badly, but they were suspicious. They asked him many questions, like 'how do you plan to repay' and 'what collateral have you' and 'if two girls share a bag of sweets, and the first girl has three sweets and the second girl has twice as many sweets as there are church towers by Rimney, then how many sweets do the girls have as the tall phantom comes lusting after their candy?' But the borrower spoke only enigmatic answers like 'quantum' and 'octave' and 'chime' and 'six' or 'xix' and soon the merchants went back to counting their coins."

The coach rocked with a wrenching jolt and suddenly stopped at a precarious tilt while the horses snorted and men stormed about outside in clinking leather belts. A grenadier strode to the window and barfed up a mouthful of spattered flowers.

"I think they have to shoot one of the horses," said the Kapellmeister clutching his baton as if that could save him, poor silly fellow.

More vomiting of petals, more rushing in leather, clinking chains and rattling harness, sword steel ringing bellishly.

"The pikemen will sacrifice themselves," said a captain of the guard. "They will wait until we are gone, to buy time, and then shoot the beast. They have already cut its throat so its neighing and screams won't give us away."

"It doth however clatter its hooves awesomely," said the dark little nephew picking his nose while looking out the coach window. "Can I look when the next one falls, and the next, and the next?"

"Pray you do not fall next," admonished the king, whose eyes were sad like a river in autumn, a cloud by a distant city, a light in a young door, a fading portrait of someone who was young long ago.

"Quick!" yelled the Kapellmeister, half rising and slamming his baton down several times on the thudding wood floor. "We must be across the border before dawn or they will pull us out in the town square."

With a jerk the coach got rolling again.

"You," the Kapellmeister said to the trope as they sat leaning toward each other. "You."

"I," said the trope.

"He spoke!" said the queen.

"No time to play with him and see what he can do," said the Kapellmeister sadly.

"We should stop and bury him," said the king. "They will be full of rage when they see what you have done."

"Your majesty," said the Kapellmeister bursting into tears.

"How could you?" said the queen, hugging her son so that her arms were wrapped around his head and his face was in her bosom. As a mother, she looked upon the Kapellmeister in uncomprehending horror.

"It seemed a good pure logic," said the Kapellmeister. "Music. Transcendant. Mathematicka. A creature that transcends time and space. A perfect alignment of stars in the sky and strings on a lute, all by the golden mean and according to timeless Hermetic principia. Think of the Romans in their heroic baths, the Popes in their vaulted choirs, those medieval armies in their gray citadels. Think of what is, and what is not, of what can be and what cannot. In the great church, that painting above where the candles flicker and incense rises in waves, where often we prayed in a devout hour, a narrow city dreamt to have a great square in which men and beasts and demons freely consort."

Iniit nuntius. (Sound of haut-boy trumpets) Nuntius: Milord! The mob are stoning the cathedrals and palaces. They have pocked the stained glass of Notre Dame de Paris. The deliquescent light that once pored divinely calmed liquors upon Your Majesty's devotions now yawns empty from shattered sockets, like vision blinded by carrion's beak and claw."

Bystander: Priceless artifacts lost. Ancient glass and treasure whose replication our knowledge fails to encompass. Ah, democracy, thy name is foolishness. Mob rule! The morbid plumb finds its true center, scale, and gravitational measure for mankind's valuation, and is found wanting. What sort of god hath made this dreadful race? What loathsome bush burns our hours this terrifying day?

Second Bystander: Praytell, is this Judgment Day?

The magician says to the king: "Sire, no matter what madness the shirtless mob commits, we must save this creature despite their fear and superstition. He is a treasure of rare beauty for your serene contemplation."

"My contemplation has not been serene within my recent memory," said the king to the magician. "The mob will come and tear out our hearts in their rage and terror. I say we dump him now."

"It will only take a few moments," said the queen.

"Can I watch?" asked the ghoulish heir as he picked his nose.

"Oh very well," said the Kapellmeister, "we can leave a few more pikemen behind. They can bury him in earth and leaves and then run through the fog or the mob will tear them limb from limb."

"Cut their tongues out so they cannot say where we are."

"Hushy," said the queen to her darling, "they could still point."

"So cut their arms off too."

The king laughed. "Then how would they bury our homunculus, dearest child?"

"With their bloody feet for all I care!" shrieked the lad so that his straw hair stood straight out and his heels kicked against the bench until a maid opened her blouse and offered him her strawberries, which he pawed while his eyes glazed in satisfaction and, deus lo vult, he grew quiet as his lips rocked and his head rolled tiredly between ambrosial kegs. Poor doomed prince, Fate would have it.

Without fanfare, and rather roughly, the trope found himself bundled, still in the warmth of his blanket, and led down the step of the coach. He stepped wrong and twisted an ankle, but it did not matter anymore. Clubs and swords and musket butts and coach whips descended in a black and deadening blanket of pain and darkness, driving him to his knees. He heard of the sound of his own bones breaking, his flesh bursting. He lay gasping and delirious in the soup at the edge of the lintels of the road while the sweet almonds popped, one by one, in a cake baking in vanilla. Women wrapped him tightly in his blanket so he could not move his broken limbs. He closed his eyes so that they would not gouge them out. He heard the hard breath of frightened men digging fast, and he smelled smoke and fight in horsemen looking often back toward the horizon from which they had come. The flame on the horizon, was it fire or dawn? Was the gray sheath under heaven smoke or cloud?

The trope found himself bundled ungracefully, dumped into cold hard clay wet with rainwater and slime. He felt loose soil weighing down his limbs, packing down on his chest so it became harder to breathe. He smelled the sweetness and departure and aching desire and poignant curling and lost voices and departing worlds in the leaves that they shoveled against his face with hard boots that left red gashes on his pale cheeks. Only his face and a small segment of his dark-haired skull protruded from the tumulus of leaves in the dripping ditch. He heard the rattle of the coaches and the cry of the coachmen and heard the dry horn and the houndish baying and the whoop of the women and the snuff box and the baton and the wigs and the departing wolfdog laugh of the boy picking his nose. He felt a tear on his cheek as he realized that the love had gone from his life. He would never understand the fractal logic of their syncopated and violent existence. Losing that music was more than he could bear.

Sobbing, he strode in long strides by the mountains that lay under the moon like a rumpled brocade of light and dark.

A train passes in a chromed streak, leaving an echo of piano tracks.

The trope comes to the window and picks up its shards. He clambers inside and puts the pieces of the window back together. He vomits up chunks of cracker oatmeal into his hands and uses his palms to plaster the broken window together as best he can connect the sharp glittering shark-fin shapes. It becomes once again stuffy and quiet in the room, and the color starts to fade. Color turns to simple texture once again, and the window heals itself.

The trope lowers the blinds, so that a faint citron light slants in and leaves its delicate grillwork on his chest and skull. He takes off his loincloth and throws it on the table, where it shatters and then reassembles into a spherical cracker bowl. His hair loosens, and he pulls it all out with his hands and stuffs it into the bowl, which now contains long whorls of hair—like fish struggling in circles, until they lose all color and freeze into whirls of wispy glass.

The nations fade from his skull, leaving only enigmatic playing fields of light and shade particles lost in the musing arithmetic and gymnopaedies of their intermeshed gradients.

The trope sits on the edge of the bed. His head and shoulders slump while he folds his hands between his knees. He has a faintly puzzled look and shakes his head. He glances toward the wall at the portrait, whose tropism and its illusions drive the reproduction and replication of the universe. The beautiful face with its lipstick smiles at him under wistful, sunny eyes, and his loinniol will forever remain a kinetic potential poised like an enigmatic grace note, or an amber pick forever about to pluck on a rigid violin string. The contra-trope's enigmatic smile says it is the height of mathematical irony that their minuet remain ever thus poised and composed, a clockwheel, in its final revolution, frozen between the tick of its penult and the tock of its ultima.

The trope's brief biographical footnote ends with a fuzzy transition effect in twilight. The Zaubermeister who made him is long gone, as are the court and his raison d'etre. The steam-powered metronome came to life and was briefly more than the sum of its parts, like his creator. Purpose became complex, and complexity fractured into chaos. The flavors were glorious but agonizing—overwhelming ice cream like a symphony, like a forest after the rain, like a desert courtyard after the hamoom.

Consider the shopping mall after closing time. In this exhausted pianissimo and piquant stillness, one hears the skitter of a sparrow's delicate claws on the tilework. One hears the wind play with a dry leaf, and one smells the dewy perfume of sleeping grass. Delicate shadings paint the stilled fountains and walls and store windows after all the sellers and buyers have left. The process is finished, the last train has left, and there will be no more gestures or deeds, but the echo of events lingers as a poignant summation—but a question rather than a judgment. One distant day, after humans have been extinct for millions of years, it will be much the same, only vast canyons instead of blank, arrayed retail windows. Our bones will lie buried in lapidary folds eons thick, like mussels in a highly polished green agate table top.

The trope, in his fading afterglow, hopes that those who made him did make more sense of it than he could in the din and flash and pain of his hour—though he sees little reason to think so. He remembers how the leaves flew around their crazed eyes and brown teeth, how they breathed together (conspired) in their plots and dishonest calculations, and the breath of their homicides came in short, hacking blows even as the lordliest among them became hunted by those without shirts. It could have been a life lived in a quatrain—cast in rhyme and sibylline fumes by the author of the centuries—who sang in a green voice and foretold the tides of kingdoms.

Now, in this hour of mops and carts, of guards and stagehands readying the next show, in this profound calm, this haunted ruin of the past—among the verdigrised copper domes, and above the fading, angled pastel surfaces of the shopping mall—a hidden owl briefly hoots in a rain gutter. The earth turns and the ocean groans with whales. Up there, in a tear drop under the man in the moon's outraged eye, night creeps across the black and ivory rails outside the lunar hotel. Look through a smoky window and see a pair of enigmatic eyes open in the birth and glow of their four humours—melancholia among them striking the most poignant notes like the fading, tolled notes of wind-stroked bell in a deserted village. Day follows perfumed day, and night upon exquisite night, like endless coral reefs in the sea where the sun sinks to the west, and long trains of treasure-laden camels throw their evening shadows on the red dunes of the Empty Quarter—all, subatomic tracks in a cloud chamber of fractal infinities.

A squirrel prayerfully sniffs leather outside a locked shoe store. Far off over the tree line, in a galaxy of street lights, a bus full of hopes and equations labors on diesel fumes to reach the next stoplight. It's all done with smoke and mirrors and atoms. The trope's surprised and pleased smile lingers peacefully as the entire song rearranges itself, and cleaning people enter the lunar hotel. On a clear night, red canyons of earth are visible during a coffee and cigarette break.

Except for some minor clots of molecules, the whole cinema is almost entirely atoms of hydrogen—nothing to it. That is the exquisite mastery of it: this light touch formed into such weighty dramas.

Dream lightly.

The moon is a pale, distant orb.

In the mall, neon words wink out, one by one.

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