0006 — HEARTS.

Back in the main chamber, the smallest of the courtiers—a thin, pallid, perfidious character named Figaro—lost his patience. He drew his sword and decapitated the unsuspecting boy standing beside him with hubristic indifference.

The head rolled to a stop at my feet. My face locked in shock.

Rumor would later recall the victim’s name: Calamity. What a name. An unsophisticated creep, they said. A peeping mook. A boy with the unhealthy habit of flushing himself down the toilet more often than not as a way of atonement or maybe enlightenment.

Figaro impaled the head on a rod and displayed it atop a plinth in the main chamber, like a grotesquely oversized fruit carved into one final, ridiculous grin.

I did not applaud. But someone did. Someone always does.

The next day, in the surgical room, my eyes were removed. And I let them do it.

I could feel them leave my skull and hover briefly in the air like indecisive full moons, craters and all.

“The right one goes first,” the doctor said, holding the glutinous sphere up to the light. “It’s the father’s side.” He spoke with obdurate authority, his voice coated in professional detachment.

“What a farcical inheritance,” he added.

Then he cackled.

When he was finished, he handed me my eyes.

I held them carefully. They were warm, and heavier than expected.

“Will you put them back one day?” the doctor asked.

In my newfound darkness, I considered the question for a moment.

“No,” I said.

He took them back and placed them into jars labeled BEFORE and AFTER, or so he said.

Without my eyes, however, I began to discern what sight had truly deprived me of all these years. I understood my situation not as a predicament, but as a succession of syncretic sequences peeling away, like an experiential onion evaporating and leaving behind the essence of all things one had ever known up to that precise schism.

I brought the jars to the main chamber, took the eyes out, and placed them gently on the same plinth where Figaro had displayed the head the day before. Then, with little to no hesitation, I smashed them with clenched, raging fists.

And for the first time since arriving, I understood.

What a conundrum.

What nonsense.

What a perfect place to stay.