Subset of Menagerie 5.

Their dossiers could be drawn from the subterranean archives and consulted for detail, for background, yes you could mine the triplicate paper-trails for elements of beginning, middle, and end, sign and symptom, diagnosis and treatment. You could make that effort, make it twenty-one times, you could chart the unlevel progressions of each body, each mind, map the histories and plot the tragedies—all of this you could do, of course, it’s standard protocol, out there—

But we are here, not there, and the familiar orchestrations of treatment, remedy, and most importantly understanding do not seem to apply now, here, in this place, in this state. This being some site of exile, some refugee camp for the indeterminate, for the unsettled, the cannot-be-settled.

Here too there lurk the impenetrable administrators, but as with the residents they administer to, they are also, in a sense, fallen. Perhaps you’ll consult their dossiers as well, and then move upward through the chain of command, to governors, to kings, to spirits and gods?

Or else this is a place and a time where previous methods expire, where moot is the keyword, where a confused and listless stasis reigns, like a sentence, a judgment—to which you would be at a loss, were you to ask, by whom?

Maybe a tilt of your perception would at least free you of certain intractable anxieties, could maybe offer a boost, a kick, serve as a palliative. A tilt leftward, clockwise or counter-, downly-upward and spheroid, change for the sake of it, a derangement of the senses—

Anything to pass the time, here, where it passes, just passes.