Boredom in limbo

    Stranded in limbo, clinging to some bits of metatext, surrounded only by the Jamaicans and their poles and little drums, Arthur moaned "There's even less background now, and I don't care, I never had a character anyway — I am just me, both of us." "Da!" agreed the comrades, who kept together better than the popes. "Dada." "That's the problem," — Hannibal looked resigned, "I was supposed to be 'back at base'. It was always too late for you guys, anyway. And where am I?" Earwicker beamed up from the subtext. "The origin is always a trace," he said.

    "What about Mama?" contributed Theodora, who was now bald and wearing dungarees. "It's all very well you avant garde people, who all happen to be men even when you are common nouns, continually abolishing the space-time continuum and/or trying to get on with the action. But I am almost as bored as the romance."

    In somewhere soon did H.C.E.
    Another stereotype decree
    Where Alf and Hannibal began
    To acknowledge that a "real man"
    Cannot hyperventilate without a physical existence subject to the usual problematics of time and space.

Back at the base

Meanwhile, back at the base:

"I love it when a plan comes together," exclaimed Hannibal. "Yo, dudes," replied his side-kicks. "Yes," continued Hannibal, "I've succeeded in opening a new plot line, ignoring what happened previously." In any case, it had become only too clear that none of it was real. The characters were poorly depicted, and there was no plot. So they all dematerialised — all apart from Prof Karswell, who was eaten by a giant snail.

But now we must ready ourselves for deeds of valour, comrades. For Arthur stands in dire need of our help.

Whisperingly

Pangram climbed on a table and whisperingly declaimed:

        "zed ox,
Jehovah, who, in one night, when he passed
From Egypt marching, equalled with one stroke
B"

    "Shakespeare?" asked Quizbang.

    "No, Coriolanus, v. iii. 44-8 (-Z)" said the Mope.

    "Phlegms fyrd wuz qvint jackbox," yelled Pangram, and fell off his chair.

    "Why all the new characters?" bemuddled Galway.

    "Not sure," replied Arthur, "but they help to fill up {arrow to the margin, where sideways is written:} THE MARGIN!

"What margin?" inquired the Jehovah Hercules, who had loved him well. Meanwhile, some of the popes and Carswellii amalgamated. "Done," said the note, "because we are two minis." Not to mention a beige Skoda, unfortunately.

It was all he had left

    "In what way does the preceding paragraph advance the plot?" asked Konrad.

    "Botticelli," said his namesake, causing several tons of goobly webble to drip like icing-sugar from the packet of chaffinch that all-of-a-hyphen alighted from the bus. Standing room bonely! Move down the list...

    "Well, it's just balls, isn't it?" protested the customer.

    "I told you so," said Big Bird.

    "O ono nyou ou dididintnt!" The other popes were less than synchronous, as wasn't Conrad, other than Khartoum. Theodora's feathers were not universes; some had as many as fifty. Four Kharswells spoke as a bust of Longfellow. "Henry, old bean," they soliloquised, "Up upon the overmantle / If there's dust you never-can-tell / Finding out is rather pointless / Not unlike a broken pencil."

    "Why blither...?" murmured Earwicker. Pangram did not reply, having only at his disposal G, K, Z and a second-hand beige Skoda. "You can't use K twice," said Earwicker, realizing. "That's what they said about the Skoda," Pangram retorted. He was fined three H's, four A's, four T's, two S's, an E, a D and an O. Recycling the bits, the weels proved of incalculable diameter. "Ulp!" he said. It was all he had left. "G#" contributed Galway, sitting on the broken violin briefly.

    "Get real..." Konrad suggested lugubriously. But there were too many to be happy blue. Like the pencil, but bring back the pink. Beerbohm Tree at any rate was dead, and Henry Irving joined him.

Very close to harmony

"No one told me about the floor," said Earwicker, emerging dustily from behind a rather old metaphor. "And why," (turning to Theodora), "did you have to be beautiful?" "Only to another parrot" she explained pentitently, "anyway, cheer up — it isn't pink any more. In fact, there isn't any background at all." Indeed, there were only floorboards, bodies and the conveniently placed metaphor. Also the romance, floating in a corner, which appeared to accomodate (sp) it. Music floated too, down the river. "Mark Antony Turnage!" said Konrad, and imploded, having finally found a piece of music which was meaner than himself. "We'll be back!" screamed the popes, in close harmony, it was, very close to harmony.

Oranges poured upwards, spraying their golden twiles merrily around Arthur's sitcom. He laughed wildly, took out a pair of turnips and stapled the Pope to the ceiling. Shabble-à-babble, hurrah! hurrah! Nay, sirrah. But Theodora exploded pretentio-pompously, erasing all traces of the void, and expunging the space-time continuum as with gobbets of junket. She gave birth to a basket, and they whipped meringue and shouted for yoy! For yoy! Many moans make light switch.

Wipeout

"Hang on a minute" exclaimed the beautiful Theodora. "This is the most sexist work ever so far. What no women — no romance?"

"And no body count," shouted Konrad, bursting through the floor, emerging from the stygian gloom beneath. Machine guns blazing, he wiped out everyone in the room — the two professor Karswells, James Galway, Boffo and the rest — the pope and the czar too, of course. But he was too slow for Arthur, who dealt him a tough blow to the head, borrowing Wilhelm's pointed stick. "It's just you and me, honey," said Arthur to Theodora.

Millimillillimilimeter and Earwicker

But it was still too stagey. "We need an audience!" cried the Pope, entering the storyline and tumbling skelter-helter from the fifth storey (line! Evitable! Effable! Smellilille!)

    "Millimillillimilimeter," couldn't pronounce Carswell.

    "Quartz glyph job vex'd cwm finks," said Pangram, appropriately.

    "Tararaboomdeay," screeched Karswell, jumping on his misspelt presqu'-namesake and painting him as greeny-mauve as the seven great greeby Marnocks of Vung. But then, as if by intertextuality,

    Earwicker appeared, like an arthropod scampering between negative spaces. Earwicker appeared, to arbitrate homophonously between Carswell and Carswell. "The Tsar is dead!" he said, "Like Beerbohm Tree — you reminded me. And Wagner. But the inhabitants of our head are alive and written." Karswell and Karswell shook hands. "But you're covered in paint!" said the Czar; the Pope said nothing, and presently popped. Meanwhile... James Galway was playing "The Flight of the Signifier" arranged for cracked cornet and broken violin.

"Melted maelstrom" explained James Galway, and detruded his flute back into his middle nostril. Whelp!

Dim semiotic desires

It was, all too late...

Not having been a book, it had been too late for the very beginning.

And yet she were a text, in all four seasons of the yore. Dore! Dorve! Dove! "The next word but three from now is illegible ?????? since it is written in a non-Earth alphabet," said Maug.

    "Aha!" screamed Professor Carswell, suddenly changing his handwrotten and leaping out from behind the nearest garbage-bush. "Gotcha!" and he threw a large button over the shipping-forecast.

    (Therefore I weather.) 1492 AD. Ameng. Amend. {Tick}

"Avaunt!" cried Carswell, "you dead Shakespearean actor!" The names scrutinised one another over the corpse of a less self-conscious era. To be was not to be. Whether the weather is whether or not, it had only been forecast. Four cast themselves disconsolately into a new dissociation of sensibility. "Grey," sighed those who were left, of whom Arthur was none and all (I, Tiresiases — but he was blind) "without tedious description, how may we suspend our disbelief?" "A la carte and up against the lantern!" responded Wilhelm militantly. Part objects and dim semiotic desires flinched from the dark light of reason. Arthur speculated — "We need a mirror!"