XXXIII.

‘In the cave of the Flower-Fruit mountain, there is no
space for bad thoughts, no room for a thousand shafts
of golden light. I went and stole the centre of the ocean
treasury, but I found no peace.’ Monkey is talking to

himself. Ever since he asundered from Gawain, he
finds it difficult not to discuss matters with another
self. He feels as bent as the Golden-Hooped Rod.
Allow me to ask him how he feels, dearReader. He

XXXIV.

wishes to go through some more metamorphoses,
but he has lost all purpose of his shapeshifting. Of
course, he feels shame about the death of Fortune
Lobo, but his malady is deeper, a leukemia of the

spirit. No soaring of clouds, or riding of mists, no
breaking up into a ten thousand bareback gibbons
can mend his ways, he has reached the outskirts of
the city of Corruption, a place beyond return. It’s

XXXV.

all very metaphorical, of course. He’s still in
Volterra, but the region of Darkness is upon him.
The galaxies in the sky are blue-shifted to-night,
in honour of Monkey’s sapphic restlessness, because

Eros, you burn us. Of all stars, the most beautiful…
blame the delicate Artemis. Walking the streets of
Volterra, the staccato repetitions of hollow steps
on the stone slabs. The amplitude and the phase

XXXVI.

of Monkey’s multi extro versality accounts for
his ability of being absolutely everywhere at any
time, and shapeshifting into everything, but the
sum of Feynman histories is melancholy and contro

versy. The Pheistos disc is a riddle that requires
much strength and temperance, not exactly our
simian friend’s forte. On multiple occasions,
Monkey has metamorphosed through spacetime,

XXXVII.

carried a vessel of wirelessness and crimson joy.
Then he rode a bubble-brane and came to Titan to
hack the NeverEnder of his computational loop.
He was responsible for the leak in the

Murakamian Well. He poisoned the well by
a blundering attempt to stop all unwanted
negativity. Living in denial was not enough,
he had to go and emotionally off-load into

XXXVIII.

the Murakamian liquid phase. Result, John
C is dead, even if his dance-zheimer would
have killed him sooner or later. Now, brane
somer-saulting is a new art, one for which the

dying Galatian would resist letting go. Even
the gallery upstream in the Archive of Myth
has a section with a dedicated exhibition on
the portrayal of such bounce-raging imbalances.

XXXIX.

Monkey is furious. ‘I do not accept suffering,
I do not accept decay. I do not accept death.
So, kill me. I cannot die, anyway. I refuse to
die.’ She is speaking to the vast emptiness

before her, and the nodding cypresses, who
always agree with her in silence. ‘An avenue
for escape, is all I need. But transformation

XL.

after transformation, I seem to fall further
into suffering, and not slip away from the
ashes of the phoenix. Perhaps I should stop
thinking in dualistic terms. Even the word

‘stop’ is dualistic. I am a cavalier servente,
I am the second marriage that corrupts the
first. I, I, I… Wait, I dreamed that Greece might
still be free. For standing on the Persian’s grave

XL.

(Ahura Mazda feels explosions in his ears)
I could not deem myself a slave.’ But Monkey,
you are a slave, even if you are a brave one,
one that would gladly die at Missolonghi.

There is much duality in your croco-tears,
and though we cannot measure the amplitude
of your oscillatory sorrow, we can venture to
say that you are a Nostromo-type unreliable

XLI.

narrator. You tell yourself stories of how much
you have suffered when you have been abandoned,
but have you not betrayed and stolen, have you
not eaten forbidden peaches (there is at least

a chapter about this in a westward novel). We’ve
all been abandoned, we’ve all been betrayed. So
what. If you die fighting the Turkish hordes, if
you trace the hidden treasures of Dacia, you are

XLII.

playing the materialist fool, are you not? Ahura
Mazda feels wild as a whirling wave, the concept
of ‘accursed one’ has haunted him for centuries.
No, Monkey refuses to surrender. He makes sail

for the primitive cloud in the sky, and his mono
mania takes new level, and his imagination spans
the size of another literature. He stabs at the invisible
whale that haunts him, but there is no vengeance.