Falling back into the Big Sleep - Part 1

Jan had recovered what was left his great accumulation of wealth.

There were his compasses, a few wrecked mechanical watches, a great amount of his books on flowers, some broken bits and pieces of a machinery that he could never make work and that now never would, pots and pans, some cracked perfume bottles, a pair of eyeglasses that were utterly useless, the recipe for making the Golem, of course, his three pounds of Arabian coffee beans, some pens and quite a healthy amount of pencils, his chess board but with almost all of the pieces gone missing, a magnifying glass, three pairs of scissors, two brass cups, a jar full of medical alcohol, his favourite pair of socks, his lucky pair of trousers, his unlucky and now only hat, some other books on mathematics, his tools he used when studying geometry, his astrolabe, a shovel he had no idea he posessed, a hatchet, needles and pins, blue yarn, some Chinese silk and some velvet, one apple, Nietzche`s Also sprach Zarathustra, a dog and a black cat, a magician`s notebook that came into his posession but which he never read out of respect, an unfinished novel, some bad poems, a finished but never published manuscript on Hermetics, two Egyptian statues, a piece of a Babylonian glazed brick he had stolen out of the Berlin History Museum right from the Gate of Ishtar, a composite bow, some arrows he made as a child, the remnants of a gramophone he never got around putting together until he lost some of the parts one by one, his written account of when he thought he might have encountered the Frankenstein monster, a photograph given to him by a friend in which he claimed he had captured the apparition of a vampire, a stuffed white rabbit, a world map and a globe. And no money. No money whatsoever.

Fearing that paper would burn he turned all his riches into gold assets, which was smart of him to do. Unfortunately for him, gold doesn`t burn like paper but it melts like wax. And it also disappears, as he arrived from his trip to find his mansion burnt to the ground and his gold bullion turned into thin air by the thieves that must of rummaged through the rubble. Jan was of course by no means distraught. He was just amused by the situation.

He set about rearranging his life by taking a nap. It was the most sensible thing to do after all. He was very tired.