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.

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.

Barbarism Begins at Home

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