A tale of criss-crossings, ventriloquism, and puppets without strings. In the beginning there were tomes, treatises, and a great proliferation of archival images. When our narrator fails to reach the ends of the universe within a single, sleepless night, she turns her attention to the discrete actions of men, in search of an alchemical approach to the writing of time. This excerpt is an overture to an essay film tracking a nameless, unseen narrator’s quixotic search for the material traces of Java’s colonial, mystical, and paleontological past – a journey haunted in equal measure by the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora and the still-murky events of the 1965 Indonesian coup d’état and anti-communist massacre.