need. Asking whether the whole thing might not, in fact, be a waste of everyone’s time. By which point the village’s whole social structure and citizenry, from exarch to lumpen, is in an uproar of cultural disorientation and anxiety and antichild sentiment, an hysteria abetted at every turn by the consultant caste, most of whom are now of course out of work because of the metamorphic changes in the child’s mode or style of answering questions and now have nothing better to do all day than hold seminars for the angry villagers in which for some type of fee the consultants will advance and debate various theories about what exactly has happened to the child and whom or what the child appears to be metamorphosing into and about what it portends for the village that its central dais’s beloved omniscient child has become an agent of disruption and cultural anomie; and in the versions with the disguised malefic shaman or the breathtaking daughter of the deceased exarch there are now also some especially costly elite-caste seminars in which the consultants theorize about just what fatal question the dissimilated magus or jeune fille dorée might have whispered into the boy’s hypotrophied ear to cause such a ghastly transformation, with various sub-versions’ consultants arguing for every sort of possible question from, ‘Why do you put yourself at the service of villagers so much less extraordinary than yourself?’ to, ‘What sort of Yam Gods and/or Dark Spirits does someone as supernaturally advanced as yourself believe in, deep inside?’ to the deceptively simple but of course all too plausibly disastrous, ‘Might there ever be any questions you yourselfwish to ask?’—as well as untold other examples which ambient engine and cabin noise obscured, the United flight evidently being filled with weather and turbulence and at least one interval during which it looked as though they were going to be rerouted and forced to land somewhere other than their scheduled destination — but with all the different versions’ and sub-versions’ seminars’ hypothesized questions sharing an essentially recursive quality that bent the child’s cognitive powers back in on themselves and transformed him from messianic to monstrous, and whose lethal involution resonates with malignant-self-consciousness themes in everything from Genesis 3:7 to the self-devouring Kirttimukha of the Skanda Purana to the Medousa’s reflective demise to Gödelian metalogic; and fewer and fewer villagers begin queuing up before the child’s platform in the village’s center every 29.52 days, although they never make so bold as to stop coming altogether because the villagers are still deeply afraid of offending the child or making him angry, especially after one incident in a recent lunar cycle in which apparently one of the brighter, more ambitious warrior-caste villagers had positioned himself in the very rear of the line and waited until everyone else had had their Q&A exchanges and dispersed and then had — which is to say the warrior-caste villager waited until everyone else had left and then had — had then leaned in and very quietly asked the child what the best strategy might be for attacking and defeating the dominant —— village’s spectral troops and necromantic shaman and seizing the —— village’s lands and exacting tribute from them and from all the rain forest’s other primitive villages and establishing their own paleolithic empire over the region, and the child’s answer — which no one hears because the rest of the queue has dispersed, which in retrospect raises questions about how the young, vigorous, essentially dark-haired and patriciate narrator on the United flight justifies including it in the catastasis — but in any event the child’s answer, which the boy evidently leans way far forward off the edge of the platform to whisper in the warrior’s tiny close-set ear, instantly destroys the warrior’s higher faculties or spirit or soul and drives him hopelessly insane, and the man reels from the dais with his hands over his ears and staggers off into the rain forest and wanders senselessly about making distressed noises until he’s eventually set upon and devoured by the area’s predacious jaguars. This incident sends the first wave of open terror through the village; and, with the demotic fomentation of the lumpen-consultants, the village’s citizens begin truly to hate and fear the child, and there is now more or less a consensus that this preternatural child whom they’d so stupidly revered and depended on and based all their advances and developments on the counsel of is, in fact, either one of the thanatotic White Spirits or a duly authorized agent of same, and that it is only a matter of time before someone catches the child in the wrong mood or asks the wrong question and the child says something which destroys the whole village or perhaps even the entire universe (the two being scarcely distinguished in the paleolithic mind); and a quorum of the exarchs officially decides that the child needs to be assassinated A.S.A.P., but they cannot persuade any of the village’s warrior caste to get close enough to the central raised platform or dais or plinth to kill the child, even spear- and/or phytotoxic dart-distance obviously being well within range of the child’s voice and the memory of their late comrade’s fate — namely that of the ambitious warrior who had been driven insane with a single whisper — remaining still quite vivid in the braves’ minds. And thus then there is apparently a brief interval during which a type of Taoist or comme on dit ‘dolce far niente’ or Zenlike constructive-nonaction movement gains ascendancy in the exarchs’ counsels, some in the warrior and consultant castes arguing that if the villagers simply all stop lining up with provisions once every lunar cycle then the child, who has not moved from the central dais in years and has never had occasion to learn even rudimentary hunting-and-gathering skills, will inevitably starve to death and so to speak solve their problem for them. . except it turns out that the child had in fact been farsighted enough to break off and stash a certain portion of all the months and years of offerings under his pallet of plantain leaves — note here please gentlemen that in the catastasis of the first epitatic variant in which the dominant —— village’s theocratic shaman functions as an antagonist it is at this point revealed via flashback or interpolation that what the disguised sorcerer had in fact whispered into the child’s tiny close-set ear when he reached the front of the queue had been something along the lines of, ‘You, child, who are so gifted and sagacious and wise: Is it possible that you have not realized the extent to which these primitive villagers have exaggerated your gifts, have transformed you into something you know too well you are not? Surely you have seen that they so revere you precisely because they themselves are too unwise to see your limitations? How long before they, too, see what you have seen when gazing deep inside yourself? Surely it has occurred to you. Surely one such as yourself must know already how terribly fickle the affections of a primitive Third World village can be. But tell me, child: Have you begun yet to be afraid? Have you begun yet then to plan for the day when they wake to a truth you already know: that you are not half so complete as they believe? That the illusion these children have made of you cannot be sustained? Have you, for example, thought yet to break off and secrete a portion of their lavish offerings against the day they awaken to what you already know you are, and turn fickly against you, and then because of their own turning become disoriented and anxious and blame you further for it, see you as the thief of their peace and begin to fear you and hate you in earnest and before long perhaps even cease to bring you offerings in the hope that you will starve or slink off like the thief they now believe you to be?’ and so forth, which monologue now in a rather oracle-to-Laius-type irony of fate appears in retrospect to have been both sound and fatal advice, although we should note that in certain sub-versions of the other two epitatic variants’ catastases there is no mention whatever of irony or hoarding: the child simply endures the catastrophe of the queues’ and offerings’ end and of his own utter isolation and in effect perverse banishment at the precise center of a village whose center everyone now goes way far out of their way to avoid, the child here enduring alone on the dais for months and months, surviving on nothing but his own saliva and the occasional nibble of plantain leaf from his pallet — here evidently echoing the way certain medieval hagiographies depict their own extraordinarily high-powered, supernaturally advanced subjects as being capable of fasting for months and even years without discomfort — and by this point in the falling action as well the weather had cleared and the fellow said even the noise of the engine seemed to have abated, perhaps because of the United airliner’s initial descent in preparation to touch down, which made it possible to hear at least some of the archetypal catastrophe over the rustling noises of the passengers all gathering their personal effects together and beginning to as it were assemble themselves for disembarkation. Because eventually they left. The village did. When the child failed to starve or leave the dais but merely continued to sit there atop it. That at some point the entire community simply gave up and abandoned the village and their tilled fields and centrally heated shelters and chose to strike off en masse into the rain forest and to return to hunting and gathering and sleeping beneath trees and fending off the predacious indigenous jaguars as best they could, such was their fear of what they decided the child had grown to become. The exarchs had organized and assembled them and the exodus was extremely quiet, and the boy was not at first aware of the mass departure because evidently for some time now all commerce and social intercourse among the citizens had been conducted only on the extreme perimeters of the village, well out of earshot of the center’s dais; the boy had not seen a living soul in the center for months. In the humid quiet of dawn, however, the child could detect a difference in the center’s dead stillness: the village had emptied in the night, they were all now spread out and moving, the papoose-laden women keeping sharp eyes out for edible roots and the hunters searching for dik-dik spoor the consultants cast spells to summon, following the herd as they had before the dawn of time. Only a small detachment of elite and lavishly compensated warriors remained behind, and as the sun rose they prepared crude torches and fired the village, the huts’ yam-thatch catching easily and the morning breeze spreading the blaze in a great phlogistive hiss as from a dissatisfied crowd; and when they had judged the fire unstoppable the warriors launched their torches like javelins at the village’s center and lit out for the jungle to catch up to the migrating tribe. The hindmost of these warriors, looking back as they ran, claimed to have seen the motionless boy still seated, surrounded by glassy daylight flames, although apparently a separate variant’s catastrophe follows only the tribe’s main body and its forced march into the tropical wilderness and includes only silence and primitive sounds of exertion until one keen-eyed child, hanging extrorse in its sling on a mother’s back, saw blue hanging smoke in the dense fronds behind them, and low-caste stragglers, turning round at the long column’s rear, could make out the red lace of a fire seen through many layers of trees’ moving leaves, a great rapacious fire that grew and gained ground no matter how hard the high castes drove them.