To Remember Those Poorly Written Novels One Reads In Dreams

Its thought would enter the thinking of Roentgen unexpectedly by an extremely oblique angle, and disguise itself as a partial plotting of the relationship between Roentgen and the police, who must've admitted defeat when their very own odd history had been so eloquently fetishized before them, and so seemingly without effort, and for no apparent reason other than respect, of a kind.

Even when Roentgen's supposed lair had been penetrated, the police were never quite sure what exactly the structure was, a house, a museum, a sort of machine meant to delude an unevenly educated animal of the city, what? One deep gallery of paintings would lead to another cellar full of the police's own missing records from 150 years ago, hundreds or even thousands of lost cases solved and the paperwork correctly completed and filed in the rotest of manner. But these spaces also held sinister clues to another kind of activity, pieces of bodies, mingled with statuary in obscene and exquisitely rendered combinations, for example, a human skull might intrude into a small figurative work of a nude woman fashioned of gold whose head had been replaced with that of a diminutive mouse's, and that head, made of glass, would then be a lamp, and in the whole of the overall composition of the object, the skull would dominate, but in its hollowness, would be overwon by the density, actual weight, and the glamor of the nude, golden, and idealized body, and the whole object seeming to both confirm and deny a single unmentioned term, something perhaps, like "meretricious". And then the fact that the gold was determined to be from a robbery case more than fifty years old, never solved, and that this was learned by odd details within the contours of the statue's material, details which were parts of the original morphology of the gold which had given up its form to the oddly illuminated "Vanitas of Verminne" as it became known.

The police, after finding several lost entrances into their own facilities began to show signs of neurosis, and finally gave up, thinking perhaps that generations of their own kind had been involved in the creation of a cult of super-organizational forgerers, and many were quite jealous of those that must've been on the inside, of what had quietly become known as, "The Revelation of Roentgen"..

There were galleries of unnamed busts whose identities amazed and teased even the best of the facial identity specialists, perfect hybrids of sets of years of the best known criminals combined with their own captor, or captors, or the presiding chief of police, or a judge. But there were other rooms, that had to do with the city's political history, its craftspeople, the bakers, the road builders, the lovers, the lost, in fact, it began to appear that the entire city had been honeycombed like a brain, and that Roentgen, curiously and fantastically, had become like an analogy, or a parody, or more likely, a miracle, Roentgen had become the miraculated memory of the city, and there was practically no area in the city in which the strange meta-city that was Roentgen's lair did not reach, and what stupendous treasures could be found there.

Even Roentgen himself, or herself had been found, but he, she, it could only be seen through certain optical prostheses or architectural conceits placed into the manifold of Roentgen's unfolding denouement of transcendent, yet ironic worship of the actual. A policemen would report of seeing Roentgen through a small mirror in a certain room, having tea with a sort of koala or swimming upward through a luminous tube, a nude woman, with a tiny, perfectly proportional man clutching her hair, nude, but wearing a top hat, goggles and swim-fins.

There were reports of an enormous green manta-ray shaped balloon coming out of one of the old chimneys in the ruined rendering station on the edge of the city, of it going up into the sky like a pylon or exclamation mark, then transforming into an elegant and verdant ray.

A spiral staircase lined with books was found that went so far down into the earth's crust that the composition of the books changed to metal, then crystal, or stone. Deep inside the earth, a hellish, but beautiful library was found, filled with heavy tomes of an imponderable and durable construction. Hot agate folios inlaid with precious metals, and written in a language which every linguist shown, said, must inevitably be of a profoundly original and expressive character.

There was even a massive lectern which formed a kind of deflect for a small waterfall
of lava whose surface was a grotesque and riotous jumble of crystals, and scorched, melted mineralogy.