he now looked again to the marketplace : shadows of long-dead men crisscrossed , often merging , then separating ; ghosts of tourists of travels-past kicked up dust and spat casually upon the sand-speckled pavement ; mirages of a herd of lesser bison-21 , drinking from the water of a distant oasis , shimmered up from a bare patch of sidewalk through which no one dared trespass for fear that these venomous beasts should advance upon them and drain them of every drop of hydrating fluid ; bands of shade grew over the facades of buildings , stretching to encompass the street and its shifting crowd of people as the sun dipped and the sky slowly darkened ; in the billowing eve , calls of sellers collided in air in jumbles of heretofore nonexistent phonemes which now manifested new language , constructing highly improbable and perhaps even monstrous word combinations that could only serve to encode and further dictate the terms of a newly-devised universe ( or set of universes ) , the likes of which would be far beyond the imagination of any sentient being here , who , hemmed in by the parameters of reason that gave shape and boundary to this particular universe , would be relegated to disregarding altogether those unlikely elements and , certainly , those seeming irrelevant factors which lay well outside the scope of his understanding or capacity to theorize ; stray dogs with bioluminescent fur barked at a dealer in illegal parlor game equipment , who skulked at the corner of the darkened alley they had marked as their territory , whispering surreptitiously to passers-by about the unmatched intensity of field generated by his electromagnetic repulsion ball paddles ; overhead hung huge bronze scarabs suspended in air by thick elastic cables which connected each metal insect with the ones next to , in front of , and behind it , until the whole network of them hung over the town in a static grid pattern , despite their tendency to bob and sway at the slightest breeze or tremor ; the smells of rotting meats , spices , nuts , vanilla tobacco , urine , naphthalene , and quick-dry semen swirled upward in fumes from the streets to creep over buildings , escape between the elastic cables , and envelop the scarabs whole in their invisible clouds , before finally sweeping over the exterior of a giant pink translucent bubble that was perched high above the entire scarab grid ; a nude bodhisattva floated in the center of this bubble with his knees to his chest and his eyes closed , as he contemplated just how far out of the bubble and into deep space the tensile wires , which pierced his arms , legs , ears , eyes , nose , throat and genitalia , extended : whence they came and why , apart from their apparent purpose as a mechanism for measuring stimulus-response activity in him , for he was merely a test subject in a double-blind experiment ; an old , wounded veteran of a forgotten war looked up at the enlightened thinker-cum-examinee and he cackled rancorously thus , wasing time , aicha papy !