I missed my wife. I awoke leaking into a strange room. I was strapped to an old self-surgery seat. My shirt had already died. The stainless steel throne stood in a garage littered with car batteries, syringes, crumbs of glass and scattered gaskets. There was a pile of tyre-rims like cybernetic haloes. It sounds more fun than it was. The moment fell into me like painful rain. The Jade and time cap had worn off. I was blood-sick, time-sick. I rolled my head a little - my neck felt granular. It seemed my throat had been doing some wholesale rasping. Three fingers were missing from my left hand, leaving the thumb and index. They weren’t too bright - they’d left me both trigger fingers. Wearing his hair back to front, Jose stood at the lowered garage door in some sort of apron. And there was Alfonso, sitting sadly on a pile of galvanised steel tubes and looking as if he might cry all over his Astra jacket. They seemed in worse shape than me, as ragged as if they had been keeping up a show of goodwill.
