Victor wasn’t living. He was sterilising reality. His apartment was an operating room, and he, its chief surgeon, carved out any tumor of chaos. His balcony, tiled in flawless white, was his personal annex of sterility on the seventh floor.

Deep in the basement of his skull, in a dark, reeking corner, a howling monkey sat chained. That monkey craved no harmony. It wanted to howl at the moon and fling filth. Every day Victor slipped sleeping powder mixed from “correctness” and “rationality” into her bowl, while upstairs he polished his façade.

Catastrophe arrived on wings. It took the shape of a single pigeon. A feathered anarchist who chose his immaculate balcony as its toilet. Each morning Victor found one solitary blot. Brazen, dead centre on the tile.

For anyone else it would have been an annoyance. For Victor it was a spit in the soul. A personal vendetta declared by the universe.

Something cracked inside Victor. The monkey in the cellar woke and rattled the bars. She wanted an air rifle. She wanted feathers exploding in every direction. She wanted war.

But the Idea of Victor was stronger. It chose the civilised route. He bought glittering ribbons. Mounted a plastic falcon. Strung up fishing line. He turned his balcony into an impregnable fortress.

The next morning the blot sat on the falcon’s head.

That was the end. It was capitulation. His kingdom, where everything was supposed to obey his conditions, had been seized by a winged vandal. He stood at the window, staring at his disgrace, and for the first time in his life felt absolute, crystalline helplessness.

He turned around, dressed in silence, and went to the bakery. Bought the cheapest, plainest loaf. Came back home, stepped onto the balcony, tore off a piece and set it precisely in the centre of the cleanest tile.

There was no logic in the act. But for the first time in years there was no battle either.

It wasn’t a white flag. It was an absurd peace treaty, signed with the only hostile superpower he had left — reality itself.

The monkey inside fell quiet. She hadn’t won. She was simply, for the first time in years, let out of the cage not to fight, but to sit in the sun and watch her jailer, that great architect of order, perform his first, awkward act of sacred madness.