Leslie Stern, M.D. Psychiatrist.

Setting: Her office. Well lit, Chagal print on the far wall, requisite couch.

Stern: It's quirky. What do you need my opinion for?

Karen: What do you think it is? Does it have some kind of, well, ... meaning ?

Stern: There you go again with "meaning." I gave up meaning a long time ago. Trying to get a table at Elaine's is hard enough. [Pause] What do you think it means?

Jennifer Antipala. Architect Structural

Engineer.

Setting: Inside St. Patrick's Cathedral.

Antipala: [Very high-strung; speaks very fast] The things that came to me, now I guess this is just the way my mind works or something, but the whole house prompted these questions, which I guess, like you said, is, uh, what you're after. Though they're not exactly concerned with meaning, I think.

[Pause]

Karen: What were the questions?

Antipala: Oh god, a whole slew of them. Anything from what the soil bearing capacity of a place like that would have to be to, uh, say, well uh... Well first, I mean go back to just soil bearing capacity. That's a very complicated question. I mean, look "massive rock" like trap rock for instance can stand up to 1000 metric tons per square meter while sedimentary rock, like hard shale or sandstone for instance, will crumble with anything over 150 metric tons per square meter. And soft clay's not even worth 10 metric tons. So that place, beyond dimension, impossibly high, deep, wide —what kind of foundation is it sitting on? And if it's not, I mean if it's like a planet, surrounded by space, then its mass is still great enough it's gonna have a lot of gravity, driving it all inward, and what kind of material then at its core could support all that?

Douglas R. Hofstadter. Computer and cognitive science professor at Indiana University.

Setting: At a piano.

Hofstadter: Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, William Gibson, Alfred Bester, Robert Heinlein, they all love this stuff. Your piece is fun too. The way you handled the Holloway

expedition, reminded me of Bach's Little Harmonic Labyrinth. Some of the thematic modulations, I mean.

Karen: Do you think such a place is possible? I have a structural engineer friend who's more than a little skeptical.

Hofstadter: Well, from a mathematical point of view.. . infinite space into no space . . . Achilles and the tortoise, Escher, Zeno's arrow. Do you know about Zeno's arrow?

Karen: No.

Hofstadter: [illustrating on a scrap of staff paper] Oh it's very simple. If the arrow is here at A and the target is here at B, then in the course of getting to B the arrow must travel at least half that distance which 111 call point C. Now in getting from C to B the arrow must travel half that distance, call that point D, and so on. Well the fun starts when you realize you can keep dividing up space forever, paring it down into smaller and smaller fractions until .. . well, the arrow never reaches B.

Byron Baleworth. British Playwright.

Setting: La Fortuna on 71 ^st street.

Baleworth: "And St. Sebastian died of heartburn," to reference another famous British playwright. The infinite here is not a matter for science. You've created a semiotic dilemma. Just as a nasty virus resists the body's immune system so your symbol—the house—resists interpretation.

Karen: Does that mean it's meaningless?

Baleworth: That's a long conversation. I'm staying at the Plaza Athenee for the next few nights. Why don't we have dinner? [Pause] That thing's off, right?

Karen: Well give me a rough idea how you'd tackle the question?

Baleworth: [Suddenly uncomfortable] I'd probably turn to the filmmaking. Meaning would come if you tied the house to politics, science, or psychology. Whatever you like but something. And the monster. I'm sorry but the monster needs work. For Pete's sake, is that thing on?!

Andrew Ross. Literature professor at Princeton University.

Setting: Gym. Ross works out with a medicine ball.

Ross: Oh the monster's the best part. Baleworth's a playwright and as far as the English go probably a

traditionalist when it comes to ghost stories. Quite a few Brits you know still prefer their ghosts decked in crepe and cobweb, candelabra in one hand. Your monster, however, is purely American. Edgeless for one thing, something a compendium of diverse cultures definitely requires. You cant identify this creature with any one group. Its individuality is imperceptible, and like the dark side of the moon, invisible but not without influence.

You know when I first saw the monster, I thought it was a Keeper. I still think that. It's a very mean House Keeper who vigilantly makes sure the house remains void of absolutely everything. Not even a speck of dust. It's a maid gone absolutely nutso.

Have you ever worn a maid's outfit?

Jennifer Antipala.

Antipala: And what about the walls? Load-bearing? Or non- load-bearing walls? That takes me from questions about foundation material to building material. What could that place possibly be made of? And I'm thinking right now of the shifting that goes on, so that means we're not talking dead loads, which means a fixed mass, but live loads which must deal with wind, earthquakes and variance of motion within the structure. And that shifting is that the same say as wind-pressure distributions?, which is something like, something like, uh, oh yeah, P equals one half beta times V squared times C times G, uh, uh, uh, that's it, that's it, yeah that's it, or something like that, where P is wind pressure on the structure's surface ... or do I have to go someplace else, look at wall bending or wall stresses, axial and lateral forces, but if we're not talking wind, what from then and how? how implemented? how offset? and I'm talking now about weight disbursement, some serious loading's going on there ... I mean anything that big has got to weigh a lot. And I mean at the very least a lot-lot. So I keep asking myself: how am I going to carry that weight? And I really don't have a clue. So I start looking for another angle.

[Moves closer to Karen]

Camille Paglia. Critic.

Setting: The Bowery Bar patio.

Paglia: Notice only men go into it. Why? Simple: women don't have to. They know there's nothing there and can live with that knowledge, but men must find out for sure. They're haunted by that infinite hollow and its sense- making allure, and so they crave it, desire it, desire its end, its knowledge, its—to use here a Strangelove-ian phrase—its essence. They must penetrate, invade, conquer, destroy, inhabit, impregnate and if necessary even be consumed by it. It really comes down to what men lack. They lack the hollow, the uterine cavity, any