Begging produces the highest frequency sounds detectable using instruments we fabricated specifically to test for them. There is always the possibility that the effort to detect unduly influences what is detected, that we are privy to but a fraction of what’s actually out there (and this fraction is somehow artificially engendered), but most educated speculation seems to favor what has already been stated – namely, that our evenings are going to get a whole lot less interesting at the exact same time they get a little bit more painful, the smell of melting rubber infiltrating our nostrils for some reason and sending us on long safaris through the deepest, most overgrown parts of our memories, including those environs where something very like rubber trees without actually being rubber trees surrounded the villages where we lived (or where we thought we lived) and we would tap on the surface of these trees with hammers just to make the adults in the vicinity angry. In the corner, looking like a casualty of skirmishes between people that are not altogether real and not altogether mythical either, people with affinities to all possible realms and feet as misshapen as feet can be and still be able to function, a decapitated Holofernes lies in a pile of his own strings and the red handkerchief obviously meant to simulate a voluminous blood loss consequent to the puppet Judith (not immediately visible) taking her vengeance on the puppet stage. Close by this giddy tableaux grins the creature down whose gullet Jonah slides during the tumult of a similar miniature thunderstorm at sea. The girl explains the intricacies of each creation separately, proudly displays her handiwork and clucks her tongue at any questions we might have as if to suggest we need only listen and watch to learn everything it is necessary to know, at least for the moment. I’m not sure why the stucco seems to close in whenever we notice we are surrounded by walls, that we are not simply wandering about on the high plains like mustang ponies, but the phenomenon is one so frequently commented on by those who make a living commenting on the things we see and hear when we are awake that I am almost certain it is an hallucination, one shared by the entire race and dating, no doubt, from the earliest appearance of that race, if not innumerable millennia previous. What purpose it serves, why it should exist and not something else, something similar but without the near flawless logic associated with it, without the emotional content delivered via a mechanism we can’t even begin to decipher or re-assemble once we have taken it apart, is something I will explain, perhaps, at length, when the opportunity arises and when my expertise has reached a position congruent with that of those likely to be in the audience. In the meantime, I will simply draw your attention to the current lack of explanation by all parties, not just myself, and attempt to bring the discussion to a graceful close by mentioning, in passing of course, the clouds just now gathering on the horizon, high and dark and irregular in shape like caterpillars – but not the pleasant, furry multi-colored sort we used to collect during childhood. Rather, the spiny, uniformly green and threatening sort we used to dare one another to pick up with our bare hands, certain that the first person to do so would be snagged immediately by those spines and forthwith poisoned, would suffer a death more prolonged and wretched than any we could possibly to that point have imagined.