Excerpt 2

Take a night. He wakes up to find himself in the park, slumped backwards over a bench, drenched in suit trousers and a shirt and tie but not a suit jacket or a bag. The suit jacket and the bag - the bag with his work and his phone and his business cards and the book he was reading on the commute, whatever that had been, he can't remember but thinks maybe it was the new Don DeLillo, he doesn't know, and food, food of some sort, a banana or a high energy sports bar of some kind - gone. All gone. He wakes as if from a restless sleep to find himself slumped on a bench in a shirt and tie and suit trousers, all of which are now saturated and clinging to his skin, not that that is the first thing that concerns him. The first thing that concerns him is the blue glue, the blue glue that seems to fill his head and his mouth and his nose and his throat and the cavity of his brain, his brain cavity, and his veins, too, more than likely, his veins and his arteries. Blue glue. At once both a feeling and a smell. Everything hurts but the blue glue is narcotic. Everything hurts but everything is also dulled and muffled. He can smell the blue glue but he is also aware that the blue glue is both inside and out. He can smell the blue glue but he also smells of blue glue. This feels like an important distinction, a distinction that has to be made. Hours could well pass in the time it takes him to get to this point and still the rain falls and still his clothes, already saturated, absorb rainwater and weight. The heaviness of the blue glue and the rain, though. This is, in the end, what provokes him, although provokes is too strong a word to describe the pollen-drunk fever buzzing behind his eyes. He moves because he has to move. He attempts to move from the position in which he awoke, arched, crab-like, dangling over a bench but everything hurts and moving hurts more and moving can't be achieved without sound.

Mhwhhhuuurggrrrgghgghggghmwhhuuurrrrggghhhgggrrrhhhhrrrhhhrrrggguuugh.