Fogged in the confabulation of the transit, I groped through crushing aeons to my favourite breakfast kiosk: unsure if the soaring concourse outside Parliament was ceramic and carbon or a metaphor; a cloudy internal warning—Now what was the message in the mirror? Something pitiless. Some blank-eyed, slow-thinking, long-grinned crocodile—“Debra!”It was my partner. “Don’t do that,” I moaned. The internal crocodile shattered, the concourse lost its freight of hyper-determined meaning, too suddenly for comfort. “Don’t you know you should never startle a sleepwalker?”He grinned, he knew when I’d arrived, and the state I was likely to be in. I hadn’t met Pelé Leonidas Iza Quinatoa in the flesh before, but we’d worked together, we liked each other. “Ayayay, so good you can’t bear to lose it?”“Of course not. Only innocent, beautiful souls have sweet dreams.”He touched my cheek: collecting a teardrop. I hadn’t realised I was crying. “You should use the dreamtime, Debra.
