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And now the light was rising on Roy Holdstrom’s landscapes, on vistas so alien and beautiful it broke your heart and reat le mobs rushed over the microscopic dunes, tiny hills, anda doom already promised but not yet arrived

I looked around with delight Roy had read ht screens inside my camera obscura head he had stolen and blueprinted and built even before I had let them free with my mouth Now, turnabout, I would use his miniature realities to flesh out my most peculiar odd script My hero could hardly wait to sprint through this tiny land

Manny Leiber stared, flabbergasted

Roy’s dinosaur land was a country of phantoms revealed in an ancient and artificial dawn

Enclosing this lost world were huge glass plates on which Roy had painted prilescapes, tar swamps in which his creatures sank beneath skies as fiery and bitter as Martian sunsets, burning with a thousand shades of red

I felt the sah school, Roy had taken e doors wide on, not automobiles, but creatures driven by ancient needs to rise, claw, chew, fly, shriek, and die through all our childhood nights

And here, now, on Stage 13, Roy’s face burned above a whole miniature continent that Manny and I were stranded on

I tiptoed across it, fearful of destroying any tiny thing I reached a single covered sculpture platform and waited

Surely thishe had set himself to rear when, in our twenties, we had visited the primal corridors of our local natural history museum Surely so char, lost in God’s coal mines under our very tread! Hear! oh hear that subway sound, his pri to be set free! And had Roy set him free?

“I’ll be goddamned” Manny Leiber leaned toward the hidden monster “Do we see it now?”

“Yes,” Roy said, “that’s it”

Manny touched the cover

“Wait,” said Roy “I need one more day”

“Liar!” said Manny “I don’t believe you got one godda!”

Manny took two steps Roy jumped three