A ping on the grand piano, and off we go, the thread is being threaded, two becomes three, the straight line develops into a trajectory, a chaotic itinerancy. We follow the thread, a vine or a twig, of tiny orchids, it happens at night, in the negative, with a spooky background rustling.
A sprinkling of notes plays on the piano. Plays through the rustling, which sounds like a warped breathing, as if we’re inhaling oxygen from a tank while scuba diving.
The breathing dominates the sprinkling of high notes. Tiny bubbles underwater?
The baseline could be snoring.
The vision cuts to being in the middle of a flowerpot, flipping from X-ray or negative vision back to normal, and then to another flowerpot. Miki speaks - a replay of the scolding, at slower speed. “It’s your fault.”
We’re all the way inside a particularly frizzy cyclamen, a pink one, so frizzy and so softly pink it is almost unbearably horny. We’re moving out to catch our breath, and back in, as if we’re giving head to the plant.
Our gaze climbs up the long legs of a beauty in a white wedding gown. Another beautiful doll of a woman, with longer hair in a lighter shade, almost a blonde, but we feel it must be Miki. She cannot be anyone else than the Chronicle of Beauty, the woman who is all women to us.
Yes, no doubt about it, the floral gaze climbs Mount Miki. She’s holding a bouquet of pink roses in her right hand. On her left shoulder she’s carrying the groom, who shouts in despair or delight, being kidnapped as he is by his mistress. The groom: that must be us. In a different kind of battledress, no armor, no sword. A tuxedo.
As if it were, or maybe it is, the figurine of a pair on a wedding cake.
There’s still that spooky baseline, snoring or inhaling oxygen underwater. And again, the vision flips to X-ray mode, accompanied by louder repeats of Miki’s scolding, “It’s your fault.” We sense there’s something wrong with the image, how the vision moves, and how the heads of the bride and groom move, but not in the same direction exactly. It defies physics.
The green leaves of a tulip intervene.
A cloud bursts. Torrential rain bears down.
And in the instant, the bride and groom lie decapitated, their heads joined, but severed from their bodies.
The tulip turns out to be yellow.
Now we see the act of falling, abruptly, nastily. We see it twice in quick succession, such violence, how the heads of the bride and groom are shaken off. “It’s your fault.”
We move out of the frizzy, softly pink cyclamen, and are woken up by a sharp clacking.
Time for Shiraishi’s impartation, note 25, “One may be wrong even about “there being a hand here.””
Or about there being a pair of heads here. One may be wrong, yes, and two maybe, too. Stupid little white anti-stone.
Perhaps we didn’t really wake up. We’re falling into another nightmare. Our head merges with that of a monster mask, and inside that mask there’s stuff moving. We see it in the hole of the pupil. The mask’s right pupil has a little doggie in it. And on the other side, behind our left pupil, we have a snake, a cobra posturing full readiness to strike.
Notes continue to sprinkle from the grand piano, but the foreground sound is gone, there’s no longer that warped breathing. We can hear the inner dialogue.
“Speed Master Snake,” asks the right pupil.
“Yes, this is Speed Master Snake,” says the left.
“Data Slave Dog here,” says the little doggie, “Data Slave Dog.”
The voices are filtered. They sound rather like us, but not quite. The vision moves briefly out of the mask, to the zombie crusader, and then right back into the mask.
“What do you make of it,” asks Data Slave Dog, sitting straight up in the black interior of the mask. The dark void of our brain. “What would you conclude from this?”
“Ah… that, well… it’s a problem,” says Speed Master Snake.
“If we deeply apologize, from the bottom of our heart, maybe it can still be fixed,” the doggie suggests.
But the cobra won’t look the whining in the eye. “Apologize!... Apologize!... We’re no apologizers,” he bites, an ominous grin on his fangs.
