This is delightful, said Sibylla. If you were at school they would not let you read a book like this, they would keep you from reading it by involving you in sport. And look! It was written in 1976, so that Liberace might have read it in his intellectually malformative years and profited thereby, instead of allowing his mind to solidify, we may say, to the state where the cerebratory atoms spent their time perpetually away from their correct lattice sites. I wish I understood this, said Sibylla, and she flashed a bitter look at Carpworld 1991, but I’m glad that you have come upon it so young. Approximately simple harmonic motion—it sounds so Platonic, doesn’t it? Plato says—oh what does Plato say? Or it may be the Stoics. But I think Plato says something about it in the Timaeus. And she looked even more bitterly at Carpworld 1992-94, and she said at last: Well anyway I know what Spinoza says, he says—and she stopped. And she said: Well I can’t remember the precise words but what he says is that the mind when it becomes conscious of its own weakness is saddened. Mens blankety blankety blank tristatur.

Her face was pinched and grey. Her eyes were burning. The next day I took the heart out and put it in my backpack and left the house.