You can only tell the seasons by the shadow on the wall and the contour that it draws as the dry light passes by the lampshade near the window — it’ll slump just by the picture-frame on a winter’s day, and in the summer it’ll rise there like the heavy slow ascent of a cargo plane that’s loaded to the walls. The days are deathless here; deathless and identical.

And it’s only by matching the fog of your breath to the hands of the clock that you know where you are, as the shadow passes overhead, and the room bleeds heat like a fresh-cut vein, and your thin and threadbare skin starts to tremble. And the midnight sun metes out the day in dizzy wheeling spirals, drawing borders as it circumscribes the sky, once and then again, once and then again, once and then again—


And the windows over yonder might as well be haunted mirrors; you can see yourself within them, out of time, standing stutter-stunned, grey and moribund. And you wonder do the others have some sense of satisfaction, some connection to the source you never found. Or do they seethe? Do they seethe like you do?

You’ve heard tell of a tunnel shot under the centre for some oblique purpose that no-one quite knows, like getting in fresh hollow-heads to fill them up again, or to break them down; some say the brickwork starts to writhe deep inside. Others say it’s an oesophagus that winds beneath the streets, beneath the residents at windows looking out with soft dimming eyes, like server farm lights, switching on and off, on and off, on and off.