As the bathysphere elevated surfacewards, Horace Mint shook the lint from his hair and gazed through the porthole at the charcoal fish snickering at him as they shot past. The vessel had been depleted of oxygen ever since the breathing regulator had broken down and Horace had been holding his breath for the last three days. His complexion must have been a technicolour sight for those on the outside looking in. At least he wasn't worried about air embolism. He rose from his command chair, hobbled on bowlingpin legs in a wobbly circle around the cramped chamber, then plopped right back down in the vacated chair. This had been his routine every fifteen minutes or so. He longed to take a stroll in a wide rippling meadow and suck the entire stratosphere of the planet into his quivering tycoon lungs.

Toted by steel cable, the bathysphere plowed upwards through a balmy cloud of ambergris. In the distance he heard the underwater tolling of a diving bell. Wiping his hands on his lavender dungarees, he kept an impatient eye on the bathometer. The rapid adjustment of pressure gave him a sincere cotton headswelling. The groaning rivets contributed nothing.

With a rush of pressure, dripping like a chrome sea beast, the bathysphere surfaced to a Boston subway platform. Horace hopped out and had a look around. A snowhaired black man in a Duke Ellington t-shirt entertained the rushing crowd with Coltrane licks on his scrimshaw flute. Horace approached and tossed a quarter into the man's upturned derby. The quarter bounced once and transmogrified into a smokecoloured pigeon which flew off down the subway tunnel.

"That's okay, son. I appreciate the gesture."

The infinite gesture.

"Come over here and sit with me while I eat me lunch. Care for a sardine?"

Horace politely declined. They sat there on a scarred bench vaguely the hue of calamine lotion, watching the commuters pass. In particular the female ones.

"Look at her," indicated the jazzman.

Compulsive liplicking.

"Say, I'd like to pinch her in strategic places."

He tossed the last sardine in his storky beak.

"Well, gotta get back to me tunes, sporto. Catch you later."

He positioned himself before his vacant music stand and launched into a twittery version of "My Favorite Things."

Horace boarded a toothpaste-coloured train. He always sat at the front of the train. That way he arrived at his destination sooner. As the underground lights streaked past, he watched a wrinkly drunk harassing a paperbag. Whenever the train made a stop, the drunk staggered to his feet and tried unsuccessfully to kick the bag out the doors. Then the doors would hydraulically slide shut and he'd sit down until the next stop where he would repeat the routine.

The train was virtually a library, Horace observed. Across the aisle from him, a schoolgirl in a cardiac sweater was engrossed in a gothic novel called The Haunted Toilet. Beside her sat a nervous sweatspeckled man with earphones strapped to his flimsy head like calipers, listening to Hooked on Chronics and following along in the instruction manual. A hefty woman with a uniboob carrying groceries in one hand clutched a book called Communists in the Summerhouse in the other but neglected to read from it. A pearshaped mother in milkstained brassiere cradled an infant with a smoking thumb.

Finally the loudspeaker bellowed "next stop, Rheumatic Heights."

Horace disembarked. A transvestite folksinger occupied the far end of the platform, tapping her foot and singing Phil Och tunes to a disinterested crowd. Daylight trickled down stone steps. Horace spun through the turnstile and headed for the surface. The fresh breeze was a maiden's handstroke across his cheek.

The city, on the other hand, snarled at him unwelcomingly.

Towering obelisks of glass poked holes in the clouds. A menagerie of birds shrieked at the intrusion. Groundlevel wasn't any more peaceful. A melee of taxihorns. People with hate in their eyes crisscrossed the pavement, trampling anything unfortunate enough to get in their path, including, but not limited to, aluminum cans, squirrels, cigarette butts, mounds of dog vomit, and small children.

He suddenly realised the past tense has toggled to present. He turns down Flabbey Road, heading past the ol' Smash and Grab convenience store featuring a sale on razorblades and lightbulbs. He follows the spittlestreaked sidewalk, blowing time, lapping up the city wounds. Women in sandals scuffle by under centipedes of viaduct construction. Urchins asleep in oil drums. Taxidrivers mugging their passengers. A mummified wino dancing his way into the auto supply store for a gasoline chaser, trying to hold the ground still as he walks, bugs leaking out of his coat lining, absentmindedly stroking his .44 calibre pencil. Legless Lucretia in her little red rocking chair, poking in the fusebox, searching for epiphany. On the brick wall of a mortuary a poster advertises the latest album by The Luddites, in stores now, available only on vinyl. In the arched doorway of The Groinery, a beggar with a face like peanut brittle crying "a penny for your hat" to passersby is arrested for noise violation. Waiting for the bus, a mother clutches her child's hand, reads to him excitedly from a pamphlet about the new boarding school he's been enrolled in. The kid gnaws off his own limb to get away.

A woman drives past, goggles strapped to her forehead, an Ojibwe dreamcatcher dangling from her rearview mirror in the event that she should fall asleep at the wheel. From her car radio a newscaster announces "angelpiss expected all weekend with a slight chance of scorching." Meanwhile she's contemplating spiderlove. Imagine all those writhing arms and sensitive feelers, makes her tingle with excitement. Octogasmic. Turns her car down the fourlane warpath and floors it. Bumpersticker reads "eatin' ain't cheatin'." It's not her car.

Horace follows the directions on a tourist sign pointing the way towards the Fire Museum, but is disappointed on reaching it, finding only a charred foundation.

A German schoolmarm bearing an uncanny resemblance to Eva Braun travels by magical hulahoop, pausing long enough to ask directions from a streetvendor selling quickdry licorice. She's been invited to the grand opening of a nightclub called the Kinky Panther which is reported to be an exact replica of a notorious beerhall in Munich. A bleacheyed former lounge singer crouches in a booth, injecting methanol into his eyeball. Edgar Allen Poet groans in the urinal after a round of cookietossing. Or as his editor calls it, a rapid review of lunch. A painful wail of fire engine streaks past, through red light intersections. There's always something on fire in this town, even if the firemen have to start it themselves.

Right this way to Leper Park where children are playing a rousing game of Yank the Pickle while the ambassador of sleep, wearing a cologne which smells just like dead person, reclines in the photograss perusing the latest edition of The Tattler. A five-year-old in a sailor suit on tiptoe inserts a nickel in the wooden indian who comes to life and belts out "oh the flotsam and the jetsam should be friends" in Oklahoma drawl, then scrambles up a box elder and refuses to come down. The freckleridden clerk who thinks he's Raphael Sabatini practices an elaborate dying scene below. "Scaramouche!" he exclaims and keels over. Beside the stone fountain a silent clown cleans the blood off his violin while his rotund partner points an accusing finger and exclaims "have I got a nose to pick with you." Water up a duck's ass.

Things are getting weird so, grabbing hold of a dangling strand of spaghetti, Horace is carried aloft past the incrementing floors of the Prudential building. Janitors, clerks, and businessmen gape at him through windows as he rises past, blocking their view of the cosmopolitan scenery. His instinct is to tip his hat to them, but fears letting go with either hand. A dapper executive squats on his swivelchair with his trouserlegs rolled up, fishing pole extended, nylon line leading into the wastebasket. The wastebasket is blue with a recycle logo on its side. The man is too engrossed in his endeavour to notice Horace drift past.

He is briefly overtaken by a swarm of schizophrenic moths caught in a dragon's gust. They flutter past him like suicidal confetti and are gone.

A hotair balloon awaits him at the top floor. He climbs in the wickerbasket and releases ballast. He glances down. Far below, a giant lizard crawls through the city streets, scooping up scurrying people with its enormous coil of tongue, popping them in its mouth, smacking its lips deliciously, coming to the conclusion that the Irish have the best flavour. The clumsy beast swings its heavy tail, toppling the Bunker Hill monument.

Horace fires the propane burners. As the balloon clears the roof he spots a monstrously large onion impaled inexplicably on the lightning rod. The air grows very cold as he rises, icicles forming from his nosehairs. Shivering, he covets his mother's flannel blanket which she always kept in her lap while rocking on her Nebraskan porch watching the sun melt into the horizon.

Ascending through the crimsonstreaked atmosphere, the hotair balloon falls under attack by vultures with razorwings. They lay siege, making kamikaze runs, attempting to slice open the leakproof material. Horace unscrews a few molars from his mouth and hurls them at the aerial assailants. They caw fiercely as teeth embed in feathery flesh, veer homewards to roost. The fabric escapes unscathed. But the drifting balloon climbs too high and Horace bumps his head on the floorboards of Heaven, nails protruding from planks, a bit of electrical wiring stapled to the undersides. The balloon folds and the basket upturns. He plummets fast, down towards the pissgreen yawn of ocean spread out below, waiting to swallow him.