Inside the drowned man, Hobbes found the whale. Inside the whale, Hobbes found nothing but junk.
Among the cardboard boxes and bin-liners, outside a restaurant called perplexingly Le Chat Noir, someone had dumped a manikin, which appeared to have been super-glued with angel wings.
A large black dog or possibly werewolf springs and snaps off its head. In the ghoulish celebration of the dismemberment of the manikin there is in fact no blood, just the crunching of prosthetic limbs.
Here in the junkyard it is often like this – moments of violence and high strangeness, followed by hours of what seems futile wandering.
Among the rubble and detritus he will come across a piece of broken or useless furniture. Perhaps stool, or chair without a seat, a bed with rusting springs. – An upended and spavined vehicle.
Sometimes he will see a frame with no picture until he comes closer. For a moment, it seems, he’s in the middle of rolling green-backed countryside, or looking down on an edgeless lake.
Objects he will sometimes recognise. The tricycle, for example, he rode when he was three or four, accompanied by an image of his younger (prouder) self… he can actually see the peddles, and the scuff marks of his blue sandals.
At one point he finds himself in a high-ceilinged room with a skylight. Water drips off the walls on the far side. In places it is awash with dirty, shitty water.
In the room with him but always with her elephantine backside to him is the cleaner. She wields a wide hard brush and bin liner to pick up the objects floating on the surface.
When he encounters the rat king, the first thing he notices is the machine gun resting on the desktop next to the computer.
Though sometimes all he sees is a pair of bloodshot eyes, the rat king appears at times unnaturally humanly large, standing on hind legs. The funny thing is he is wearing a posing pouch. Could this all be some hideous joke?
If the rat king certainly thinks so, his question merely elicits soundless chuckles that seem to be saying:
“What did you expect? – Everything is topsy-turvy here and you are really living in a larger, wilder universe.”