An instant before, I had been sitting alone on a fiendishly comfortable sofa and slowly sliding into a reverie that might lead to sleep or to that placid joy that sometimes comes out of nowhere in a crowded room. Now I smelled anise, as if someone were toasting it in a pan beneath my nose, and the two glasses at my feet hurled their contents into the air, as if the room were abruptly dropping into a bottomless chasm. The streaming Jugendstil lines of Chateau Musar framed two entwined figures by the buffet table in such a way as to sketch an open door in the air. My vantage point had rotated around a single point and I was looking through an opening that had always been present but was only now accessible, into what smelled all at the same time like a musty cellar, a furnace, a fishmonger’s and something else that my nose had no name for. From the doorway a voice spoke to me. The words were unclear, as if from a radio tuned improperly to the station, and the greater part of what was said escaped me in a river of noise: FA LA JI RO JI JA. All the same, it came to me perfectly that my correspondent was the extranoematic masque of the great Anaximander of Miletos, now part of a galactic consciousness and here imparting to me the knowledge that the true reality is a series of five concentric branes or skeins, arranged as spheres, the inner kernel of which is wrapped tightly around the uttermost crystalline circumference in such a manner as to defy Newtonian physics.