“And here we have Le Musée Louvre, in miniature, of course.”

He cast his hand around the pedestal like he was twirling it with ribbon, his gaze level with the museum. Two eyes peered through a glass pyramid to where I stood on the other side. The pyramid sat on the table as if it were a button on a shirt of concrete.

The tour guide could tell I was stunned by his display of passion. He had something in store for the finishing blow.

“And...” he reached inside his shirt pocket, sniffed around the blue-spotted handkerchief, and pulled out a pair of tweezers, “…here we are...”

With the precision of a surgical hawk he lifted a roof panel from the building, unleashing a holy light disco, and preceded to descend his arm, hand, tweezers, slowly into the guts of The Louvre.

He was a human sky crane.

People the size of cribbage pieces ebbed through the golden halls. I saw the holistic representation of humans then, failed to see a single flesh body as an “I” any more. Perhaps that’s what God feels when they mark someone with fatal cancer and roll a multimillion jackpot at another. Balancing cribbage pieces.

The tour guide’s flesh claw was just another art installation to the visitors that day. Through and around his fingers they danced like the crushed wheat shot through the processing machines of a sampling factory. The windows were large enough to fit the head of a pin, so the acrobatics of the tour guide’s hand were hidden to me from where I stood.

He was an artist, a finger trapeze gymnast in their element. Briefly I heard him catch a sneeze – the tweezers didn’t stutter a hair. Then, like an emergency pilot ejection, the flesh crane was pulled from the river of little people, he hung the tweezer before my eyes and we both straddled it with our cross-eyed focuses.

There on the tweezers was a black dot.

“There…” grimaced the tour guide. “The one and only.” He lifted the tweezers so the light caught it and, so subtle I thought I imagined it, I saw some seaweed green and pink speckled in the dot.

My facial expression, or lack there of, gave me away.

“Do you not know what you are looking at, friend?” queried the tour guide with a grin. I admitted to him I was at a loss and shook my head slowly. This only widened the smile, like the horizontal motion of my head was pneumatically connected to the corner’s of this man’s mouth.

“It’s a pity humans were gifted with only six million cones in these eyes. Imagine what art would be like for an owl – or a mantis shrimp. Certainly their junior artists would trounce a Monet with a few brush strokes.” He was saying all of this while studying the black dot, as if his attention and his alone, was the key to unlocking its meaning.

I remained confused. My tour guide was laying a candy trail for me to eat up so that I’d arrive at the wonderful insight that, ah yes!, all the answers to all my troubles would flood into me, suspended before my face. But I was amiss.

Being cross-eyed and straining to focus on this tiny fleck was giving me a headache.

There’s an unwritten rule between the tour guide and the guided: if the guided remain mute, the tour guide must press onward.

The tour guide pressed onward: “This, my friend, is the smallest reproduction of the Mona Lisa.” He trailed off, leaving room for us both to awe at what had just been spoken.

“Did he use a small paintbrush?” I said.

“Huh?” said the tour guide. The moment was broken, the dot had lost both of our attention.

“Well, he or she, did they use a tiny paintbrush to paint the tiny painting?” I repeated.

“Mm, yes. Yes. A tiny paint brush, a tiny easel, a tiny man, and an even tinier set of oils.” the tour guide was back to studying the dot, this time far less intently. He seemed to have adopted some of my confusion.

“And tiny feet.” I said.

“Eh? Tiny what?” said the tour guide.

“Tiny feet. The man who painted that probably had pretty small feet.”

“I suppose so, yes.” said a deflated tour guide as he looked down at The Louvre, gave it a face as if the whole thing needed a good clean.

“All those groceries. Must be a lot of work, right.” I continued.

The tour guide looked up at me, gave me the same look he’d just given The Louvre, “Groceries?”

“For the tiny feet to carry. Must be one hell of a distance to walk with such tiny feet and carry groceries around.”

“What, no. It’s the same relative scale, carrying groceries, or handbags, or – oh whatever. That’s not the point.” His noble hold on the miniature Mona Lisa had drooped at my questions.

Then the tour guide asked me, “Do you know who Leonardo Da Vinci is?”

“Hmm.” I replied, then looked down at all the cribbage pieces as they went two and from the same black dots, speckled all along the wall. There was a particularly large cluster of people around one part of the room and it was barricaded off so the people couldn’t get too close. I wondered what was so interesting about that part of this building.

“No – who’s that?”