I’M STANDING IN AN IMPOSSIBLY dense, thin street, with tarmac under my feet. Ahead of me there’s a grubby tower block that may have been shiny once. On either side of me tattered shopfronts display postcards, newspapers, shoes, cameras, hats, sweets, sex toys and rolls of fabric, but none of them looks open. I think it’s night-time here: the sky is hard to pick out, but the light is artificial and I can see something black above me, although there are no stars, and there is no moon. All around me, broken neon signs crackle like acne scars. Two or three of them flicker in sexual colours – rouge, flush pink, powder white – but the rest of them just look like they may have last worked a long time ago. The space above the shop fronts is tangled with dim sodium lights, street signs, corrugated iron shutters, and windows of what seem like hundreds of apartments and stockrooms. There are signs everywhere, sticking out at right angles from the buildings like Post-it notes in an old book. But I can’t read them.
Can I move forwards in this space? Yes. I can take a step, and then another. I can see an alleyway off to my left: another impossibly thin space. At the end of the alley I can vaguely pick out what looks like a steel fence with barbed wire curled on the top of it. There are fire escapes everywhere: zigzags and spirals leading up and down tired brick walls. A blue light dances in an upstairs window: a television? So there is life here beyond me, although I don’t feel particularly alive. I don’t feel hot or cold, alive or dead, drunk or sober . . . I don’t feel anything. It’s actually pleasant, not feeling anything, although of course it doesn’t directly feel ‘pleasant’. It doesn’t feel like anything. Have you ever not felt like anything? It’s amazing. Perhaps I feel so calm because there are no people here. I’ve been in spaces like this before – Soho, Tokyo, New York – but there were always too many people shopping, camera-clicking, talking, running, walking, hoping, wanting. I get claustrophobic in big cities, overwhelmed by all that desire in one small place, all those people trying to suck things into themselves: sandwiches, cola, sushi, brand labels, goods, goods, goods. But there’s no one here. There’s a bus stop, but no buses; road signs, but no traffic. I walk on, and I can actually hear the dull thud of my footsteps on the hard street. A turning on the right leads to a small square with a gurgling fountain in the middle of it. Here I see shadowy coffee shops with their tables and chairs crowding the dark pavements, and a couple of small city trees growing out of concrete blocks. I don’t want to get lost, so I soon come back to the main street, unsure about what to do next. I turn around, everything jumbling in my vision.
Where do I go? I think.
And then a woman’s metallic voice informs me: You now have fourteen choices.
My image of the street in front of me is overlaid, suddenly, with a console image: something like a city plan on a computer screen in my mind. A few areas flash briefly in a kind of pale computer-blue colour, like war zones on a map of the world. These are the choices, I understand. But . . . ? I don’t actually understand anything about what’s going on. The nearest ‘choice’, if that’s what this means, is the third floor of a block right next to where I started. I walk a few paces and start climbing the zigzag fire escape, the rubber from the soles of my trainers hitting the metal with a hollow, clanging sound. Soon I come to a green door with peeling paint. I push the door and it opens inwards. What do I do now?
You now have one choice, says the disembodied voice.
I’m inside.
You now have one choice.
You . . . I’m standing still on four bent legs and – oh, shit – I’m trapped. All around me are thick, blurry plastic walls and I can’t move. I can go forwards a bit, and backwards a bit – I know that – but I am still at the moment. Fuck. I can hardly breathe. I keep blinking because my vision doesn’t feel right: everything outside of my prison looks brown and warped, and there are reflections everywhere. And I’m hungry; a hunger of a sort I’ve never experienced before, from a place in my stomach that I don’t recognise. Whatever I am, this is a kind of hell: this is a feeling you could have in a nightmare for only one or two seconds before you woke up screaming. I can’t move. I can’t turn around. My arms/legs/wings are pushed into the sides of my body. I think I have a tail, but I can’t move it. It’s pinned down by something. And I think I’m probably going to die here, on my own, unable to move even my head. Come on, Ariel. You are still Ariel. Yes, Ariel plus . . . What? Who am I? Into whose mind have I telepathed? I – or at least ‘we’; I’m having the same problem Mr Y had – want to scratch. I want to eat: I know that’s why I came into this box. There was something sweet and crumbly which I did eat, but not recently. But almost as much as that, I want to scratch. I love it when my sharp foot rubs against my ears, taking away the itch, and I’d give anything to be able to do that now (not that I understand the economy of hope). I’ve tried – in fact, I keep trying. Why can’t I move? I, Ariel, can see the Perspex walls, but the other ‘I’ doesn’t know what’s going on. This being – the other I – panicked, hours ago. She couldn’t do what she always does in these situations, which is to try to run fast and look for somewhere dark and soft to hide. But it’s hard to think of this being, this thing I am now part of, as ‘she’. My fur (‘My fur’? Well, that’s how it seems) smells of fear now: a damp, sweet, biscuity smell. And I know this smell from the others, from the ones who return with teeth marks in their bodies.
Zoom out. Maintain third-person. For God’s sake, Ariel, you are not a mouse. But I am. I know how to groom my fur. I have been pregnant a number of times (I don’t think she can count, but I can. I’m not sure if she has language, but I have. I can count things in memories perhaps she doesn’t even know she has). I remember the aching feeling of giving birth, like pushing on a new bruise. I know I am going to die here, but surely I can’t know what death is? Only elephants understand death . . . Where did I read that? I’ve got no idea how long I’ve been here, but I want to get out. Let me out! I try to scream, but all I hear is the fast breath of the mouse, her heart beating instead of mine.
What do I do now? I know how to make myself calm in these situations. I’ve stood on crowded tube trains and in lifts thinking ‘Not long now’, and ‘Breathe’. But my consciousness has merged with this one and I know, because she knows, that this is danger; that it is imperative to escape now. But we can’t move. Shit, shit, shit. How do I get out of here? Where’s all the information Mr Y said he saw on the edges of his vision? As I think that, something like a computer desktop snaps into focus. Now I can see what the mouse sees – a vast chamber warped by the plastic and browned by its tint (although she doesn’t understand that, and believes she is somewhere she has never been before because even the scent is different in this plastic box) – but with an overlay: a console on which I can make choices. It’s hard to describe what this looks like, since I have no idea how it works. It feels like a computer desktop, but everything on it is unfamiliar. I don’t know how to navigate it. But it does seem that when I call for it, it will come. And presumably it will get me out of here.
In the top right-hand corner of my vision is a blue square that twinkles when I look (think?) at it. The rest of the ‘screen’ is layered with small milky squares, each one very faintly showing a landscape I don’t recognise. It’s like a hundred science documentaries playing on the same screen. What are these images? As I glance over each one it becomes momentarily brighter, like a link on the Internet, and I realise (I don’t know how) that I can choose to jump into one of them: presumably to perform what Lumas termed Pedesis. But I don’t want to do that. I need to get out of here – out of the Troposphere – and release the mouse from her trap. I look over the milky images again. One of them intrigues me more than the others: the landscape seems extra-terrestrial. But – oh, no – the moment my thoughts rest on it and I think ‘This looks interesting’, something begins to happen. I’m blurring – that’s the only verb I can think of – out of this reality and into another one. I think ‘Stop! I didn’t mean it!’ But it’s too late.
At least I’m not trapped any more.
Now my paws pad over a cold, hard surface. I feel my back end sway as my paws touch the ground top-right; back-left; top-left; back-right. I have a tail that I can move! This seems both familiar and unfamiliar to me: something I’ve always had; something I once had a long time ago. The pale concrete below me (and I feel myself putting my own word on that, concrete) is ice-cube (ditto) cold, and I walk faster on it because of that. But I am warm enough. I have only just left my nest and the memory of so much fur, and the smell of my family (I’m translating as I go, here, and ‘family’ is the closest I can get to this sense memory of togetherness and connectedness) soothes me like hot syrup (ditto). I am a mouse again (I think). But I am free.
There’s something between my back legs: familiar to this mouse, but not to me. It feels odd, like my tail, but while my tail is like an extra limb, this new thing feels powered-up like a clitoris, but there’s more of it, and it extends from my stomach to somewhere outside of me. It tingles now as hot liquid comes out of it and hits the concrete. And I’m thinking that this will keep others away, and I’ve always done it because of this. My fur twitches with abstract nouns, an untranslatable, non-human sense of pride, property, future planning, and a constant, musky desire for violence – my claws in the backs of my small, pale rivals, ripping their flesh – and sex. Perhaps that’s what I live for most of all: the way my brain trembles and softens as this clitoris-like cock moves in and out of the warm, tight hole in another being, and the feeling of oozing sweetness that eventually spreads in my stomach, back, legs and throat, so sweet that I fall over, clutching her, she, whoever. I have desires – perhaps that’s all I am – but I don’t seem to dwell on them. My mind isn’t equivalent to ‘I want, I want’. It’s more like ‘I’ve got, I’ve got’. Only one thing is bothering me, as I wander around this space, with its bins on wheels that are bigger than me. Where is she? One down. One missing. One gone. I might not be able to count but I can certainly subtract. It’s not fucking good.
Even I’m shocked at the idea that a mouse would swear until I realise that these are my thoughts merged with his: his feelings in my language. I should be trying to get out, but the feeling of being here, being him, is almost addictive. Everything about him is charged. Even his/my whiskers vibrate with electricity and anticipation, like live wires coming out of my face. He’s moving now, so much lighter on his feet than I ever can be on mine, and it’s like being on a fairground ride. We move over the concrete towards the other bin, and I know where I’m going but at the same time I don’t know, and every movement is a surprise. It’s like being the driver and the passenger all at once. And there’s something so sure about these movements, and the sensation I’m now feeling: the sensation of biting into a stale piece of bread, marinated in rain – a piece of bread I recognise as being stale because I threw it out, but which now seems delicious: a savoury taste, like Marmite on toast.
But I do have to get out of here. This mouse is fine, but the other one isn’t. She’s in a trap I set and I have to get her out of it. I think ‘Console!’, like I’m playing Space Invaders or starring in an SF film, and yes, the thing appears, filming over my vision. I plan to ignore the milky images, but then two things happen at once: in the vision behind the console – the mouse’s vision – I see an orange blur, like a smear of marmalade; and in the console I see one square in which the image displayed is not like an alien landscape, one square in which there’s a grey mouse sitting by a bin wheel eating bread. That’s me. Something is looking at me.
Now it all becomes confusing. My mouse has seen the orange cat, and it’s as if we’ve both had an injection of icy cold water and gone onto high alert. It’s fear, but a kind of fear I’m not used to. Death, death, death is coming. Fuck. My whole insides have turned to this icy mush and I have to run; I have to hide . . . But hang on. The icy water is solidifying. I’m freezing into place. I know (some level of knowing that I haven’t experienced before) that I have to keep still now. And I, Ariel, want to just get out of here, but some instinct I didn’t know I had – some mouse-instinct mapped onto my own – sees that there’s also a doorway (grey, official) hovering over the cat. It makes me focus on the milky square with the statue-mouse in it, the square belonging to the cat, who is looking at the frozen sugar-mouse, whose terror I can feel in the tiny trembling in my own/our own body, and I think ‘Switch! Switch!’
And now I’m blurring again, into something bigger. My tail now feels lighter, and I flick it around as I crouch here, crazy with anticipation, my thin tongue licking my sharp teeth. This is going to be fucking fun, and I’m not even sure I can wait before I pounce. I move my bottom around in a repeating arc, balancing myself. Now? No. Wait. Need the right moment, totally the right moment. I’ve done this thousands of times before, and I could never, ever get bored with it. I don’t plan my attacks in any detail, but when I remember them they are like bloody ballets, with me as the director, poking the dancer with my paw, making the food dance, making it pirouette on broken legs, because I like food that moves. I do eat that brown shit in the plastic bowl, but I don’t enjoy it: it tastes like death. I only eat it to survive, because half the time I have to wear a fucking bell that scares the food away. But I can take the bell off if I work long enough at it, picking away with my precise claws. So I have no bell and now there’s food in front of me. I anticipate the way the warm blood-gravy-liquid will taste in my mouth once I’ve torn the furry coating off this thing shaking in front of me, trying to appear still. I remember the taste . . . Oh, God. Oh, yuck. It’s like hot Bovril mixed with iron tablets and rust. And now I’m thinking that must be disgusting, really, but the synapses (or whatever) in my mind and the cat’s mind are now jumping up and down like kids in a junior debating society. After a couple of seconds, I’m almost convinced that blood is delicious after all, but whatever is left of me that is human and vegetarian thinks ‘No!’ I can feel this thought blending with the cat’s thoughts, and so, when the mouse decides this is the moment to leg it under the bin, I hesitate. And my cat-mind does a diving backflip, just for a second, but it’s enough to fuck everything up. There’s a voice in my mind telling me not to do it. I don’t understand this. I don’t have concepts like Why? in my language. This is like a headache, some memory of a white room and a table and being held down by my neck as something sharp jabbed into me. Well, no one’s holding me down now.
Fuck off, passenger.
No.
You’re like a flea inside my head.
Well . . . Maybe you’re right. Why save the piece of food, anyway? What is ‘saving’? Nothing makes sense . . . Ariel: you are not a fucking cat. You were that mouse. You remembered your nest. But I’m not a mouse, either. And now I want to taste its blood.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXX A buzz in my head I don’t recognise. A chemical stronger than fear.
I’m moving forward slowly now. The food has moved under the bin. New strategy. Not Game Over. I crouch and my back is a perfect curve: one shoulder slightly higher than the other, my left paw in front of my right. I’m going to crunch your skull, and I don’t care how long I have to dance with you first. I’m . . . You’ve gone. Where are you? Where’s my fucking food . . . ?
The mouse has gone. He’s safe. My mind now has a celebration party and a funeral going on in the same room.
Console. Now I really have to get out of here. The thing comes up in my vision again, jerking as my hitchhiker consciousness bobs up and down with the cat, padding towards the wall, and then – wow – jumping up onto it. God, I liked that. But I have to get out of here. I’ve saved one mouse, but there’s still one more to release. I glance around at the desktop space again, ignoring the milky images in the centre. The only thing left is the blue object/image, and so I direct my thoughts at it. Quit now? says the female voice I recognise from before. ‘Yes,’ I think. ‘Yes, yes, yes . . .’ A door appears in front of me and I am me again, twisting the knob and walking through on two heavy legs, with no tail. But I don’t recognise this place. I seem to be in a long corridor with grey carpet and beige walls. Oh, shit. Where’s the fire escape? How do I get out?
I walk along the blank corridor; past notice boards with nothing pinned on them, past bright white office doors, until I reach a lobby with four lifts in a row. There’s nothing on these walls except for one safety image: a green stick man and a green stick man in a wheelchair both moving towards a bright white exit. The stick man is winning. Not knowing what else to do, I press the button to call the lift. Instantly, all four sets of doors open. I smile at this. Is there really no one in this place apart from me? A whole city to myself – if I even am in the same city I started in. But I can’t stay: I have to get back. I randomly take the third lift along from the left and press the G button. It drops down faster than I would have liked, but I don’t feel sick. I still don’t feel anything. Once I’m on the ground floor I find a set of revolving doors that takes me back out onto the street. And then I see something odd: a small white business card lying there on the ground. It wouldn’t look odd in a normal city, lying on a chewing-gummed pavement amid all the old crisp packets, fag ends, receipts and torn pieces of newspaper. In a normal city, you wouldn’t notice it. But here, it really stands out. I bend down and pick it up. The name Apollo Smintheus is written on it in brown ink. There’s nothing else. I pick it up and put it in the pocket of my jeans.
I’m on a deserted main road lined with quiet office blocks. There are signs for subways, but there’s no traffic, so I walk across the road, climbing over the barrier separating the two carriageways. Now, I could go left or right or straight on, down a smaller road. Something about the smaller road seems familiar, so I walk onwards, afraid but not actually feeling fear, like I’m watching myself in a film, until I recognise the alleyway on my right with all the fire escapes. That alley was on my left before. Now I see. Somehow I ended up in the large building I was facing when I first arrived here. So, presumably, all I need to do to get back is to keep walking onwards, onwards down the road and then – yes – into the tunnel with the zeroes and ones and all the letters of every alphabet I’ve ever seen. Then I open my eyes.
Back on the sofa. I’m alive. I’m home. I’m human. I feel cold. I need to pee. The sense of disappointment I often get when I wake up from normal dreams has now mutated into something else: the disappointment of being me, here, now.
My overwhelming thought: I want to be back in the Troposphere.
And a weaker thought: but you wanted to get out.
Strange how I keep thinking about drugs, but that’s the connection Mr Y made as well. This time I’m remembering a bathroom, a long time ago. In fact, it must have been just before I went to Oxford. I was in a bathroom in Manchester with a big guy who gave me a tiny little pipe, coated in green enamel. I remember sucking on the pipe and feeling something I’d never felt before: complete contentment, something similar to how you feel just after an orgasm, but more – where the whole world is a big soft duvet and you’re just about to go to sleep, and you feel as if nothing will ever hurt you again. I sucked this stuff into my lungs and it tasted like ammonia. And I asked the guy what it was.
‘Freebase,’ he said. ‘Like crack cocaine. You’d probably best not do it again; it’ll boggle your head.’
In the same way that I immediately wanted to have another go on that pipe, I now want to get back to the Troposphere. So maybe that’s the curse.
Muddled thoughts, muddled thoughts. It’s quite obvious that I’ve just been asleep again. I can’t have been in the Troposphere. It’s a fictional place, a place from a book. But I still get up from the sofa and, before going to the loo or anything like that, check the mousetrap under the sink. And I feel sick. There she is, the being whose memory and thoughts I shared, trembling in the little box, her tail caught in the catch. I don’t think I ever really looked at the mice in the traps before, or even thought about them very much apart from trying to remember to release them outside as quickly as possible. But now I’m looking. Whether it was ‘just a dream’ or not, I know exactly how she feels in there. I undo the box, my hands fumbling on the catch, trying to free her tail as gently as possible.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say to her. ‘I’m so sorry.’
I gently place the box on the floor and she walks out backwards, slowly at first, with her nose twitching. I expect her immediately to become a grey streak across the floor as she runs for cover, but instead she sits there looking at me, scratching – I know how much she wanted to do that – and then just sitting there, her tiny black eyes locked on mine. I recognise this stare from somewhere, and I return it instinctively. We stay like that for a full minute, and I’m sure she knows. I’m sure she knows, on some level, that I was in her mind, and that I understand her. She’s not afraid of me. Then she does go, scuttling away under one of the cupboards. I check the other traps and find them empty, then I throw them all away.
There’s something wrong with the light. It takes me a while to realise – I go to the bathroom and pee, and spend about four or five minutes looking at myself in the mirror, wondering what someone else would find out if they got inside my head – but as I come back into the kitchen and put on some coffee, I notice what it is. It’s dark already. Then I look at the clock and see why. It’s four o’clock. That’s odd. I took the mixture at about eleven, I think. And I was in the Troposphere for about half an hour, or at least that’s how it felt. Maybe I am losing my mind.
I check my jeans pocket. There’s no business card there.
I look out of the window: there is no cat.
But I will look up Apollo Smintheus later, to see if it’s a real thing.
The oven must have gone out while I was lying on the sofa, and now I’m shivering in the cold. I remember the way it was in the Troposphere: the no-feeling of the place, the lack of any temperature. I want that back. But if I can’t have that, I want to be hot, hot, hot. I turn on more of the gas rings and stand as close as I can to the stove. Soon my coffee’s ready, but I don’t go anywhere with it. I just stand by the stove, shivering and thinking. I should be warming up by now. Am I ill? Has that mixture affected me in some deep way? Is it fucking up my whole system?
And then I think that if I really have just travelled through some strange other dimension, into the minds of mice (and a cat) and out again, that would probably make me feel a bit weird. I mean, surely that would make anyone feel weird? This thought makes me smile, and then laugh. Only I could telepath into the mind of a sex-obsessed mouse and then a psycho cat. This would be a good story to tell, except that I don’t tell stories, and no one would believe it, anyway. I stop laughing. Everyone else who has ever done this has died. If you added that to the story, then no one would laugh.
There’s a buzzing from my bag. A text message.
It’s Patrick. 4give my persistence, it says, but i need u again asap.
Oh, Christ.
After checking through all my encyclopaedias for references to Apollo Smintheus, I eat dinner early – a bowl of rice with the last of my miso. There’s something wrong with my flat this evening. It’s not just that time has passed too quickly: it feels empty, cold, and dirtier than usual. Not bothering to worry about the electricity, I switch on the big kitchen light and the lamp, and I put on the radio while I’m eating. I don’t usually listen to the radio at this time of day, and I have no idea what kind of thing is on. I want something comforting: half an hour of eccentric people talking about travel books, for example, or gardening. Instead of that I find a religious discussion programme. Looking at the clock, I guess that it has been on for about ten minutes already. There are about four different voices, including the presenter.
– . . . but Mantra II shows that the patients who were prayed for did not do significantly better than those who were not.
– I disagree . . .
– [Laughter] Come on. You can’t disagree with scientific findings. It’s there in black and white in The Lancet.
–For those who don’t know, Mantra II – Mantra, I believe, standing for Monitoring and Actualization of Noetic Trainings – was a study concluded earlier this year. It set out to discover whether or not prayer significantly helped a group of heart patients. The group of patients didn’t know whether or not they were being prayed for. The external prayer groups ranged from Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and Buddhist . . .
– Mantra II is not the only study in this area – I feel I have to point this out. What about Randolph Byrd’s classic 1988 study? Or William Harris’s Kansas City study of 1999? In Harris’s study, conducted in St Luke’s hospital, the prayed-for group did eleven per cent better than the group who were not prayed for. Scientists have been researching this question for decades. They keep researching it because it has absolutely not been made certain that intercessional prayer does not help people. In fact, it is quite clear that prayer has some effect, although we are still a long way from knowing what that effect might be.
– Certainly, what I have observed in my practice is that prayer does have effects in the world. Coming back to Mantra II . . .
– But this is all ridiculous! Where is the proof ? In the Harris study you mention, Roger – and which I looked at closely in my book – even the researchers themselves admitted that there was only a probability factor of 1:25 in the study. In other words, there would be a one in twenty-five chance of the result they obtained appearing on its own, by accident, by chance. That’s certainly not enough to convince me. The Lottery would not be profitable for very long if all it had were twenty-five numbers and you only had to pick one of them!
– As I said, coming back to the Mantra II study – and I suppose this is relevant to the Harris study as well – you have to ask who is looking at the data and how they are interpreting it . . .
– Oh – so it’s a conspiracy now? The researchers have ‘hidden the truth’?
– No, of course not. But perhaps something like prayer can’t be understood in studies with data and graphs and probability factors. How do you even begin to measure something like this? For example, what is ‘one unit’ of prayer?
– There is an interesting ethical question here about God, I think. Regardless of how we interpret the data from studies like Mantra II, we have to ask: supposing prayer did help people – what sort of a God would only help the people who asked, or who had other people to ask for them? Surely this implies an inequality of treatment of people by God, even though we are apparently all God’s children, all equal in his eyes?
– Yes, that’s an interesting question. Perhaps the whole concept of prayer is in itself a paradox. Perhaps you can’t pray to a God who treats all equally. Perhaps then prayer becomes a redundant idea. If God loves all people equally, presumably one should not have to remind him to care? There should be no logical reason for intercession.
– I agree that this is a profound point. However, you can ask: what if it isn’t God? What if the success of prayer actually reveals something about the power of thought? Can thought actually influence matter?
– Like spoon bending?
– Yes. [Laughter] I suppose you could look at it as being a little like spoon bending.
I finish my rice and light a cigarette as the discussion goes on in the background. At least the voices are there, reminding me that there is a tangible world beyond this room, beyond my mind. Where the hell did I go this afternoon? And, I can’t help thinking now, how long before I can go back there? Maybe I should try again as soon as possible, and see if a) the place is as real as it felt this afternoon and b) whether, if it is real (whatever reality is in this context), I can navigate it with more success than I managed the first time.
A train rattles past and I wonder where it’s going. I haven’t been out today.
I smoke another cigarette and try to get warm, but it doesn’t work. I should probably try to get back into the Troposphere for that reason alone: at least I won’t be cold any more. If only I didn’t think the events of today point towards me being mentally ill (empathising with mice – I think that’s a tick in the box) – and if I wasn’t so bloody cold – then this would be, unequivocally, the most amazing day of my life. So I’ll do it again. I’ll find out if it’s real (although I will try to avoid cats). And then what? Freak out? Celebrate? Have a nervous breakdown? There is no obvious logical thing to do before, during or after this situation, other than stop everything I’m doing right now and allow there to be no more before, during or after. But that’s the one thing I will not do. I have to try to go back.
As I settle back onto the sofa with the paraphernalia of my new addiction – the card with the black circle and the vial of liquid – there’s a knock at the door. Is it Wolf ? Ignoring it, I sink back into the sofa, vaguely thinking about how I never did get onto a psychiatrist’s couch, and I drink more of the mixture and hold up the card over my eyes.
The tunnel.
The road.
Console.