Someone begins hollering wildly at the far end of the room—not the end by which the guests entered, but the other one. It is a chap in a getup similar to, but not quite as ornate as, the grand wazir’s. At some point he switches to English—the same dialect of English spoken by flight attendants for foreign airlines, who have told passengers to insert the metal tongue into the buckle so many times that it rushes out in one phlegmy garble. Small Kinakutan men in good suits begin filing into the room. They take seats across the head end of the table, which is wide enough for a Last Supper tableau. In the Jesus position is a really big chair. It is the kind of thing you’d get if you went to a Finnish designer with a shaved head, rimless glasses, and twin Ph.D.s in semiotics and civil engineering, wrote him a blank check, and asked him to design a throne. Behind is a separate table for minions. All of it is backed up by tons of priceless artwork: an eroded frieze, amputated from a jungle ruin somewhere.