Excerpt 1

1

He is not without clarity, even in his darker moments. He is not yet beyond the pale of knowing and realising and being aware. There is, still, despite everything that the authorities or whoever would have you believe, something - something cognitive. A kernel of thought and memory. A will, to do right, an urge, more primitive, to destroy, to consume. The back and forth tick and tock between will and urge. There is knowledge too, dimly flickering, a bulb on its last legs in some damp, infested basement, a bulb twitching like a lazy eye in the basement of a building that has long been abandoned but there - twitching and flickering - none the less. What goes on, behind the heavy, sleep-deprived eye lids, behind the glaucous eyes, is a tree falling in a forest miles from anywhere or anyone. Sated, he can be rational. There is clarity. There are moments of clarity. Clear spots in the jaundiced haze. He can think and remember and there are connections, fitfully snapping and fizzing like power lines cut down in a storm, lashing and biting at the rainwet street below. He isn't a monster. He isn't a monster because he can still think I am a monster and this, thinking I am a monster, is what stops him being a monster, in the final reckoning, although he is and can be monstrous. He knows that.