Meanwhile, in a dank cell in the bowels of the NYCFTS -- which was a string of descriptive redundancies -- it occurred to the ex-walk-around-as-you-please-artist that while it had taken him certainly almost a half century to fully explore and get comfortable in the recesses of his own mind (the day he discovered the old National Geographics piled up in his medulla oblongata stuck particularly in his recollections, especially when he ran across the famous 1934 "Samoan Women go Swimming: An Anthropological Report with Pictures" article), he was not going to get the luxury of doing that with his new accommodations. For a start he had this large ball and chain attached to his leg, and upon the ball was written "WRECKING BALL, NY" which for a brief moment he thought might have been a factory town along the Hudson River, until he looked up and saw in a prominent place on the wall a photograph of 4 ancient old derelicts except that 3 of the derelicts had been crudely airbrushed out, leaving ghostly rocknroll silhouettes and the logo underneath the one remaining, read simply: "AND YOUNG". Which seemed to him to sum up almost everything that made people unhappy and on the edge of madness in the world, a kind of Platonic groping for what could never be, AND YOUNG as well.

His mind raced. He remembered that in one escape he had read about from durance vile, Edmond Dantes had substituted himself for a corpse in a shroud, and been flung over the parapet into the waters surrounding the Chateau Dief, and thereby made his escape, found the incredible jeweled cave of Monte Cristo, revenged himself on his archenemy, and ultimately triumphed with the exquisite Mercedes!! Of course, under the current circumstances he didn't have a corpse to substitute for, though if he killed himself that would get him past Part A of the escape plan, i.e. finding a corpse to put into the shroud, but not past Part B, cutting the shroud underwater and swimming free of the swirling sea around the Chateau Dief, or even parts C-Z, staying alive until he got his hands on the exquisite Mercedes, etc., since he would already have been dead in order to get Part A rolling.

Another thought that occurred to him was that Mistress PushmiPullu had said something to him once during one of their intermittent substitutes for conversation that he had not fully taken notice of. She had been drinking wine a lot, and mixing French and Italian wines which was not a good idea, and left her somewhere off the coast of Genoa, more or less in the same spot that drowned Percy Bysshe Shelley, and not all that far from the Chateau Dief, come to think of it, and she said: "Truth is, Coyote, my dream in life is to be able to talk to dumb animals, and I am practicing on men. I figure that a few years of that, and I might be able to move up to plankton." For some reason, this seemed to him to be too optimistic a scenario, but then you had to be an optimist to run the Mudcat Tavern.

At this exact moment, when he was beginning to wonder if there might be summer courses at the Neil Young, or elsewhere, that prisoners could take in Elementary Plankton; and also that he might rot in that spot forever, which would eventually get him to Part A of his plan, but again, B, C-Z would be not materially assisted, there was a sound as of someone with no backbeat tapping what sounded like a message on a spoon through the wall. Another inmate perhaps? He leaned against the wall to listen.

Not for the first time he cursed his lack of languages. Not only could he not speak a word of Elementary Plankton, but Spoon was new to him. Would no one ever do something about the educational system?????