He had to find, “any bald men with wild, staring eyes.”

Maybe he could think about why, but really, left alone by the Bollock of Wanting, following a course of action in which you weren't hounded by it to do the other things, the other self-destructive things with leaves he chewed that made him feel weird and bad at the same time, but purposeful, and booze and sometimes even food and often times women. He could think about it but being left alone by it was enough. Women. Not nice ones, with whom, you know... but you know, acts not terribly beneficial to their self-respect either, he could relate this also without even too much self-recrimination. But it was sufficient right now, had been since he'd met the Cyclops Pry-Boak, that he had a Bollock of Wanting that did not want. As far as there being any purpose to his existence, this was as far as it currently went in conscious terms.

He had to find a mad eyed bald man. Not for the first time, he felt, irrationally, a wild-eyed bald man could be a solution to a problem that he had, but not only him. Maybe the world.

He found himself in a wild, carnivalesque courtyard. Midgets holding balloons, floating far above their heads, freakishly tall topless women with towering hats on their heads that signified, he didn't know, but they were crowned, each of them, for some reason not at this point terribly clear, with individual numbers. The very tall topless skinny women – eight feet tall, if they were seven, each with these weird tall hats, again, on their heads, towering almost over the walls of the palace themselves - he wasn't exaggerating to any great extent. Each of these, on the crowns, of these hats, had a different number.

One of them, nearby him, chasing after one of the balloon midgets, she had the number six on her head and Art asked her directly, he was curious, what it meant.

She bent down toward him - Art was tall enough, but still from a great height it was as if – the hat helped – she was descending toward him. To whisper, he thought, in his ear.

He was curious what they could mean, the numbers, that each of them, had, on their heads, on their hats. They were numbers, in fact. He had his numbers – he'd said that. He had had this thought, and he expected it to be confirmed, but when. The number six; bent to whisper in him, she abruptly turned herself behind, twisted her entire frame, leapt once, threw something at the other end of the courtyard, that one of the midgets deftly caught, on the leap, and then left the courtyard entirely.

Art really wanted to know what the numbers meant, but, suspecting he'd get the same response each time, and that in fact he'd probably committed some terrible social faux pas by even asking, he decided against further enquiries.

Still only midgets and the giraffe women – their necks too were supernatural long. He felt intuitively that they had been bred for this task, this task of being numbers, he felt, in some ineffable sense, that - but also for some other purpose he could never guess.

But now he felt a terrible impulse. Whenever he felt this urgent need, to say terrible, or crude, or really crude, really overly descriptive stuff as it entailed organs etc... this was likely a sign, in fact it definitely was, that the Bollock of Wanting was in a mode of wanting, pre-wanting, that in fact if he didn't get direct to where he should be post-haste, he'd shortly be wanting other more awful and directly destructive - more specifically in terms of his own body and psyche, really both, but/was - there any difference or separation – but -

Still they were looking far away, and that was it. This was indisputably a want from the Bollock of Want. The big women. He wondered if any of them would permit him to insert his penis inside any part of them that they were comfortable with. Bad sign. He had to proceed at pace.

He had to – but look around. Just freaks in here – him, too, okay – him too. But -

Where? These wild-eyed, starey, bald men, he needed one. This was the proper process by which he'd get taken to the Queen.