As he lay in the bath he felt suddenly uncomfortable – there didn’t seem to be anything he could look at with real interest – the same faucet, the same knobs, the same tiles, everything carefully chosen to be in appearance and quality far above the generic level of a hotel, but yet, with time, they’d grown equally anonymous. If he’d been a pope or nobleman in the Italian Renaissance, he thought, there would have been a lot to contemplate, hand painted panels and exquisite carvings – the things that were now in museums from that time that hadn’t come from churches had, after all, been created to be private property, to be displayed and appreciated by individuals at home. But wouldn’t Botticelli’s magnificent Birth of Venus, painted on a wedding chest, become just another piece of furniture if seen every day?

But the reproduction of it he had next to his bed for years had never become part of the wallpaper, and had, in fact, seemed to always radiate a promise of beauty that had allowed him to get out of that bed when he might have found no other reason.

And, as his eyes fell on the plastic Minnie Mouse figure perched on the soap ledge or Mr. Bubble on the label of his bottle, they too seemed to have a spirit, a depth that transcended these single representations of them, the way the statue of god or saint did. For some reason their familiarity did not produce the same ennui the rest of the room did. Was it merely the fact that they were anthropomorphic characters, endlessly reproduced, the players in crude dramas that made them still interesting? Was it their ability to be manipulated, to enter into play by performing new actions in new ways, ways that the rest of the room couldn’t?

Or was their force even more occult than that – were they some kind of modern spirit, contemporary expressions of the same energies that were perceived as demigods or fairies in past times, the household daemons of the Greeks? Were they new manifestations for avatars from another dimension seeking to incarnate themselves in our own?

As usual, Mr. Bubble’s smile remained as inscrutable as Aphrodite’s…