Eiger is not talking. He is in a group of people who are talking and you could think that he was joining in but he is not. He nods and laughs at all the right moments. There are noises coming from his face that sound like words but they are the noises his brain makes while it’s waiting to start again. Engine idle you can see it. Hans Eiger hates this crap.

“HALLO HANS this is Banjo he is an artist.”

“Hallo Banjo that is an interesting name I am Hans Eiger.”

“I am so delighted to be here Herr Eiger I have heard so much about your mountain.”

We shake hands. Eiger is still not present. He doesn’t even bother to squeeze my fingers to pulp or eyeball me. I am an artist. An ant. He smells of some sort of rich masculine scent like iron and leather and goat blood but there is something off about it like—

“Yaaaawuh what have you heard of Die Festung?”

“O it is my absolute—it is my nemesis Herr Eiger you know I am an Ambiguitionist I specialize in situational ambiguity in the induction of doubt and your facility—I hear it is all about certainty.”

“Yes! That is quite true in fact it is—”

He looks at my face again and there it is: his brain waking up. Eiger, like a snake half waking inside his own skull and peering out of a socket.

“Have we met before Herr Telemark?”

“Were you at Burning Man last year I was part of the group wearing only stolen footwear reconfigured as clothing—”

“I was not—”

“Then it is more likely you have seen my photograph recently I have permitted myself to become famous although I have reservations about the commercialized Nietzscheanism implicit in celebrity but anyway as soon as I received this invitation I had to come immediately. I wanted to see the installation and of course to put a piece into the show.”

The snake has gone back inside. Art talk will do that.

“And what is your piece?”

“O I have not made it yet Herr Eiger but I think already there must be scrap metal iconic Swiss items. Infrastructure, agriculture, homogeneity must all be expressed and questioned.”

“Your work is to undermine?”

“O by no means to examine Herr Eiger. In many cases that amounts to the same thing owing to the hollowness of modern systems you appreciate—so many of them—they are simply Ponzi schemes they rest on nothing. But something with solidity is revealed as absolute by my interrogations the Rock of Gibraltar piece for example—”

(I can hear Charlie breathing heavily she is going to have to make one up and add it to my cover by tomorrow morning I am a bastard—)