"Yes, I feel I could do this."

"How would you find a place to live?"

"I would go to the Munic.i.p.al Available Local Lodgings Clearing Office."

Dr Valspitter looks approving, nods and makes a note. "Good. And how would you find work?"

The obvious next question. "I would approach building site managers, but also I would go to the Munic.i.p.al Local Employment Exchange."

The doctor makes another note. I think I'm doing all right here. I need to. I have to get out. I have to get away.

Last night I found I could not sleep and took another small-hours wander along the corridor, down the stairwell and along to what I still thought of as the silent ward. I could not help it; I felt drawn there. I don't think that's what woke me up but once I was awake I found myself thinking obsessively about the rows of still beds with their vacant-eyed, near-silent patients, and the contrast with their appearance in daylight when they were awake. I couldn't think what good padding down to look at them would do, but I couldn't think of anything else to do either and maybe just seeing them for real rather than in my mind's eye would let me get back to sleep eventually.

So I went, I looked they were all just the same, though there were cards and personal items on the bedside cabinets and a few chairs scattered throughout the ward, all the things I'd convinced myself hadn't been present on my first two visits but which I suppose were always there then I came back again.

There was somebody in my room. I had left the door closed and my light off, but now I could see some light showing beneath the door, reflecting dimly off the shiny floor. At first, of course, I thought it would just be the duty nurse again.

Then I saw more movement, at the far end of the corridor, somewhere inside the day room. A pale figure, moving across the dark s.p.a.ce, disappearing then reappearing and coming towards the low lights of the corridor. The figure in the day room emerged into the half-light of the night-dimmed corridor lights and was revealed as the duty nurse, walking back to his desk at the end of the corridor holding a magazine and flicking its pages, intent on it. He did not look up, so did not see me.

I felt a sudden terror and shrank back against the wall as far as I could, hiding behind a metal cupboard holding fire-fighting equipment. The duty nurse sat down at his station at the far end of the corridor, feet up on the desk, still flicking through the magazine. He stretched out to one side I could hear the wheels of his chair squeaking and turned on the radio at a low volume. Tinny pop music sounded.

I could no longer see the door to my room. Who was in there if not the nurse? Was it my former attacker, whoever had tried to interfere with me? Perhaps I ought to go to the door, fling it open, confront them, the noise and commotion of course attracting the attention of the duty nurse. Or perhaps I should just approach the duty nurse directly and tell him there was somebody in my room, let him deal with whoever it was.

I had decided on the latter course and was about to step out from behind the fire-equipment cupboard and walk towards the duty nurse's station, when, from the far end of the corridor, I heard a toilet flush.

A door creaked and closed. I stepped along the wall to the nearest door, twisted the handle and let myself in. This should be a private visiting room, empty at this time of night. Sound came from somewhere near the toilets. Slipper-slapping footsteps came, and I recognised one of the old boys, a not-quite slack-jaw capable of holding a conversation and talking about something other than television or the weather. He went, head hunched, past where I watched via the cracked door.

Somebody said something and he looked up, waving down the corridor, no doubt at the duty nurse. I opened the door a little further to watch him go. When he was opposite the door to my room, a couple of doors short of his own room, the door to my room was flung open and light spilled out. "Mr Kel?" I heard a strong male voice say.

The old guy stood looking confused, staring blinking at whoever had addressed him from my room and then down the corridor. I heard seat wheels squeal as the nurse said something, voice inflected in a question.

Then a bright light shone into the old fellow's face, he put his hand up to shield his eyes, the duty nurse shouted something, the bright light went out and a man tall, well-built, in a dark suit went running past me and away down the corridor towards the stair well. He held a chunky-looking torch in one hand. In the other hand he was carrying something else. He thrust it inside his jacket as he ran past me. It was dark and heavy-looking and I knew it was a gun.

So: "Can I leave?" I ask Dr Valspitter. "Can I go? Please?"

She smiles. "Perhaps. I will need other doctor to come to same opinion, but I think you can."

"Wonderful! Can we get other doctor, their opinion, today?"

"You are in such a hurry to leave?"

"I am. I want to get out," I say. "Today."

She shakes her head, frowning just a little. "Not today. Maybe tomorrow if other doctor agrees with me and we can complete all required paperwork and provide you with clothing and belongings and money and so on. Maybe tomorrow. I cannot promise. But soon, I think. Maybe tomorrow. We shall see. You must understand. You must be patient."

I want to protest, but I am aware that I have pushed things quite far enough already. If I seem too desperate to get out they might take that as a sign that I'm unbalanced or neurotic or something. I do my best to smile. "Tomorrow, then," I say. "I hope," I add, before the frowning doctor can reiterate that it's still only maybe.

"No!" I wail, staring at the two beige pills lying in the bottom of the little cup. The cup is colourless, translucent plastic, and tiny; a stingy measure of drink if you were serving spirits in it, and yet to me it seems like it's as deep, dark and dangerous as a mine shaft. I stare hopelessly into it and despair. "I not want to!" I am aware that I sound like a recalcitrant child.

"You must," the old nurse tells me. She is starting to lose patience with me, I can tell. "They harmless, Mr Kel. They give you a good night's sleep, that's all."

"But I sleep good!"

"Doctor say you must have them, Mr Kel," the old nurse tells me firmly, as though this trumps everything. "Do you want me to go and get doctor?"

This is a threat. If she fetches a doctor and I still refuse to take the sleeping pills I may well find that such a protest too will count against me when I ask to be released from the clinic. "Please not make me," I say, biting my bottom lip. Perhaps I can appeal to her emotions. This is only partially an act. However, she is not moved. She has seen it all before. Perhaps a younger nurse might have been persuaded but this old one is taking no nonsense.

"Very well, we get doctor." She turns to go and I have to reach out to her and say, "No! All right!" She turns back, and at least has the decency not to look smug. "I take them," I tell her.

First line of defence: I think I can fool her and just keep the pills under my tongue until she has gone and then spit them out, but she insists on inspecting my mouth afterwards and so I have no choice but to swallow them.

Second line of defence: I'll go to the toilets and throw them up. But the nurse is watching for me to do this as she goes down the corridor dispensing drugs and twice shoos me back to bed with the threat that she'll inject me with a sedative if I insist on going to the toilets. She knows I already went not ten minutes ago.

Third line of defence: I'll throw up here in my room, into my water jug or out of the window if I have to. I can sign myself out voluntarily if I have to. Everything subsequently will be harder if I have done so the finding a place to live and a job and so on but not impossible. I am not stupid, I can survive.

Some time later I am vaguely aware of being pushed gently upright and something the water jug, perhaps being taken out of my hands. I am tucked into bed and the light is turned out. I feel very sleepy and in a way happy to be so, cosy in my wrapping of sheets and the feeling of dozing quietly off, while another part of me is shrieking with fury and terror, screaming at me to wake up and get away, do something, anything.

He comes for me again during that night. The drug still holds me, and it is as though everything happens through layers and layers of swaddling, through multiple bundlings of something insulating and muddling, making everything vague and fuzzy round the edges.

There is an impression of the quality of the light and sound around me changing somehow, of the door being opened and closed very quietly. And then there is the feeling that somebody else is here in the room with me. At first I feel no sense of threat. I have a vague, groundless and completely stupid feeling that this person is here to protect and look after me, to tend to me. Then I feel something happening to my bed. I still persist with the vague sensation that all is well and I am being cared for. They must be tucking me in. How nice. How like being a child, safe and warm and loved and quietly looked after.

But I am not being looked after, and the bed is being unmade, not made, untucked, sheets and blanket loosened, a way being made clear.

I feel the sliding, spiderly-creeping, probing hand slide into the bed and over my body at my hip. I feel my pyjamas being touched and investigated and then the cord that ties them being found, and gently at first tugged at. The knot does not give, and the tugging becomes harder, more impatient and aggressive.

In all of this it is as though I am watching everything on a screen, feeling it not as something that is happening to me but as something that is happening somewhere else to somebody else and the sensations accompanying the experience the sensations that are are the experience are being transmitted to me through some technology or ability I have not heard of. I am dissociated from what's going on. This is not happening, or at least not to me. So I have no need to react, to try to do anything, because what good would that do? It's not happening to me. the experience are being transmitted to me through some technology or ability I have not heard of. I am dissociated from what's going on. This is not happening, or at least not to me. So I have no need to react, to try to do anything, because what good would that do? It's not happening to me.

Except, of course as one part of my mind has known all along, and is still bellowing and yowling about it entirely is is happening to me. happening to me.

The hand undoes the knot on my pyjama bottoms and pulls them forcibly down. There is a roughness and an urgency to the hand's movements now that was not there before. I think that whoever is doing this realises that I am truly in a deeply drugged sleep and so am not likely to wake up and start resisting or screaming. And there is, too horribly, horribly a feeling of something like the uncaring pa.s.sion that infects lovers, when they cannot wait to get at each other, when clothes are ripped off the self and the other, when hands shake, when bruises happen, unmeant, unfelt at the time, when shouts and screams and crashings and bangings ring out without a care who hears them, when we abandon ourselves utterly to something that is neither fully ourselves or them any more but something that lies between us, aside from us, beyond us. I think I can remember feeling like that: wanting somebody like that, being wanted like that. This this single-handed furtiveness, this selfish, unmindful groping, however urgent, however needy dear f.u.c.k, this is a sad, pathetic, petty thing in comparison.

Something inside me wants to cry, confronted with the memory of such wild and joyous pa.s.sion, such fervently mutualised desire, contrasted with this sordid, sweaty feeling and grabbing and squeezing. I think I do feel hot tears in my eyes and on my cheeks. So I can feel, at least, if not react. Would I rather this than outright unconsciousness, until it's all over? Is it better to witness such violation and know that it most surely happened, or better to know nothing until one wakes up sore, bemused, suspecting perhaps, but able to dismiss it, forget about it? I don't know. Anyway, I seem to have no choice, either about it happening to me or about the fact that I am aware of it.

The hand tires of manipulating my genitals and starts trying to turn me over, onto my side, rotating my body so that my exposed rear is turned towards my violator.

What heat there is in tears of such frustration. How can I let this happen to me? How can somebody do something so base and selfish and debased to another person? My brain is still minutes behind events but my heart seems to be waking up to what is occurring. It thrashes and spasms in my chest, as though trying to wake me up through the sheer physical disturbance pulsing through my body. I feel something happening with my behind. I think my arms and hands might be flapping now, trying to move, to beat away, though I could be imagining this. I go with the feeling anyway, trying to reinforce and strengthen it, imaginary or not.

Something enters me. A finger, into my a.n.u.s. Too thin and hard and jointed to be a p.e.n.i.s. No worse than a doctor's dispa.s.sionate probing, in theory, but this is not dispa.s.sionate, this is not for my own good, this is only for the pleasure of the person doing this to me.

Motherf.u.c.ker. How f.u.c.king dare they. I summon one vast wave of disgust and fury and put it all into one arm, striking back at my a.s.sailant. Then I squeeze my lungs, contract my belly, throwing a pulse of sound out upwards through my throat, vomiting a scream that quickly turns into a cough and a terrible, squeezing, constricting pain all across my chest, imprisoning me.

The finger pulls roughly out of me. I heave myself onto my back, getting a glimpse of my attacker as they send the seat clattering to the floor and dash for the door.

I recognise him. It is the duty nurse from downstairs, the fellow who whistled, his uniform covered by a patient's dressing gown. He puts his head down and hunches his shoulders as he makes his escape into the corridor outside. I hear the duty nurse on this floor, a female nurse tonight, saying something, then shouting. My door slams shut.

Outside, I hear running, but I am flat on my back, hardly hearing it for the noise in my chest, hardly caring about anything any more except the sensation that a ten-tonne iron giant is pinning me down, one knee planted firmly on my chest as he squeezes the life out of me. The band around my chest cinches tighter and the pain grows a little worse. The last thing I'm fully aware of is the nurse coming into my room, taking one look at me and running off. Is that the reaction of a seasoned professional health worker? I'm not sure about this, but somehow it scarcely seems to matter any more. This crushing, constricting pain beyond pain is all that matters.

An alarm sounds, not that I can hear it very well in the vast, over-everything silence that seems to be dropping onto me like some inky overcast, raining pain. Then I think the door bangs open and somebody starts thumping me on the chest. As though I haven't had enough to endure this night.

They tear open my pyjama top and I want to protest. Please; pa.s.sion, something shared, wanted, yearned for, not imposed, not this. Wrong. They put my head back, put their lips to mine, and kiss, blowing into me. I smell her perfume. Oh, that old sweetness. I will miss that. But still unasked for, still a sort of violation. Also, frankly, been eating garlic. More thumping and thudding against the hollow cavern of quietness that is my chest.

I drift away, despite the smashing and whacking and the regular, purposeful, breathful kissing trying to fill the void caged by my ribs. Then voices and lights and a feeling of crowding. Come all ye in. There is plenty of room here, my loves, in my empty chest and increasingly vacant mind, if nowhere else. So be at home, my guests; I'll stay so long and then so long.

Something pulls across me like a hawser, side to side, plucking me like some thick and fleshy string set vibrating, forcing my back bowing up off the bed, jangling every nerve and fibre of my being before releasing me, letting me fall back with relief.

Something resumes, some regularity returns to matters, like a stopped engine at last coughing hesitantly back into life. I think. I don't know. I'm still sort of drifting, like a boat at a quayside, half disconnected, just one painter securing it, letting it move and wheel and jerk according to the vagaries of tides, currents and winds. It would not take much of a tug to separate me altogether from this mooring, but I am lucky and it does not happen.

Feeling myself drift into a sort of warm fog-bank, a pocket of peace, I b.u.mp against the pier again and am secured once more.

And so here I lie, back in my own bed in my own room, brought back to life and grateful for that, but lying here in dread, for I think I have seen what happens next, I believe that I know what is coming.

I cannot get away. I am too exhausted, too weak, too sedated, too disabled by all that has pa.s.sed to be able to get up and go or even sit up and beg. I try to speak, to tell the staff what I fear, what I have seen happening, but I seem to have lost the words. I can formulate the sentences in my head and I think I am speaking them in my own language inside my head well enough and perfectly coherently when I speak my own language out loud, even though I know n.o.body will understand, but the translation into the language spoken here, by these nurses and doctors and cleaners and other patients... that seems to have gone from me. I speak gibberish no matter what I try to say, and anyway talk so softly that I think they'd struggle to hear even if I was enunciating with exemplary clarity.

So here I lie, seeing through the day and the hazy sweep of the sun's slow track across the sky outside and the sheltering blinds between us, waiting for darkness, waiting for night, wondering if it will be this night and knowing that it will be, and the dark-dressed man will come for me before the morning.

I feel tears well in my eyes and trickle gently down my cheeks, intercepted and guttered only when they meet one of the various tubes and pipes and wires that join me to the various pieces of medical equipment cl.u.s.tered quietly around me like mourners around somebody already dead.

The Transitionary No wonder I've been losing track of myself. I'm sitting at a little cafe a short way from the railway station, back to the wall, nursing an Americano and watching the boats stream up and down the Grand Ca.n.a.l. Just along the broad quayside, a line of tourists stand with their luggage waiting to pick up water taxis. At the next table two Australian guys are arguing about whether it's espresso or expresso.

"Look, for Christ's sake, it's there in black and white."

"That could be a misprint, man, like Chinese instructions. You don't know."

I am still toying with my new-found senses. Sensibilities, even. I have done no more leaping into other people's brains, whether Concern or civilian. I seem to have a sort of vague spotter sense, which is quite useful. I can sense that the baffled, disordered, demoralised intervention teams are still milling about the Palazzo Chirezzia, their members collecting themselves, tending to their wounded, making their excuses to each other and themselves, still not entirely able to understand what really happened, and waiting for back-up and a.s.sistance to arrive.

This is all happening just a few hundred metres away from where I'm sitting. I am ready to move quickly away if I need to, but for now I'm happy that I can see them without them seeing me. Another sense: they give the impression of deaf people talking loudly amongst themselves and not realising that they are doing so, while I am sitting here perfectly silent. I would be nervous about putting it to the test however, I'm oddly but completely confident that a spotter could pa.s.s me by right here, a metre or two away, and have no idea that somebody capable of transitioning was sitting watching them. And of course they have no idea what I look like now.

I have been able to take more control of this gla.s.s-walls, future-paths sense. At the moment it is telling me that nothing especially threatening is imminent. Looking backwards is possible too, though. It's like I can see down corridors in my head, in my memory, and as though there is a near-infinite series of doors angled partially to face me as I look down from one end of any particular corridor, so that by looking closely and then zooming in on each one I can see what happened during different transitions I once made. There is an uncanny impression that this is at once one corridor and many, that it leads off in an explosion of different directions scattered vertically and horizontally and in dimensions that I would struggle to put a name to, but, despite this, my mind seems able to cope with the experience.

Here is the time just pa.s.sed when I bamboozled the whole of not just one conventionally configured but high-skill-and-experience- level Concern intervention team, but two (and more like three, if you count the people watching the perimeter), all at the Palazzo Chirezzia, barely an hour ago.

Here is the time I sat in a room with somebody I thought I loved and watched transfixed as her hand moved through a candle flame like silk.

This is me chasing two f.u.c.ked-up kids though a Parisian sink estate and watching them die... and again, except differently.

Here is the time I blew that musician's brains out while he sat in his preposterously blinged half-track.

Look, observe how I save a young man from certain death.

Here, see how I stare at Madame d'Ortolan's t.i.ts, zitted with diamonds.

And this is me with my pals walking down a street and stopping by a fat old geezer sunbathing in his postage-stamp-size front garden, one sunny day, long ago.

I sit, indulging myself in my own internal slide show, amused as all h.e.l.l.

I've let my Americano grow cold. The Grand Ca.n.a.l still froths with boats pa.s.sing to and fro. The arguing Aussies are gone. Confusion tempered by affronted professional pride still reigns at the Palazzo Chirezzia. And there is a little fear there, too, because their back-up has started to arrive at last and they've heard that Madame d'Ortolan is also on her way, with questions.

A warm wind scented with tobacco smoke and diesel exhaust stirs me from my reverie, back to the present and the insistent reality of the here and now.

Indeed; all this historical stuff is highly intriguing, but there is the small matter of my being hunted with pretty much every resource the Concern is able to bring to bear. That needs attending to. Beyond that, the coup that Madame d'Ortolan would appear to be trying to mount is either proceeding or not. I have already done what I can in that regard. I can only hope that my attempts to alert Mrs M to the targets I'd been sent after worked, and they have been warned and put themselves safe.

My present embodiment came complete with a mobile phone. I try calling my new friend Ade, on his way here with a cunningly worked container full of septus, but his mobile telephone is switched off and his office tells me that he is away, expected back tomorrow sometime. I look at the timepiece wrapped round my wrist. The smaller but more important hand points to the two parallel lines just off the vertical, to the left. Eleven. Adrian said that he should be here by four in the afternoon.

We are to meet at the Quadri on the Piazza San Marco, safely surrounded by the tourist throng.

It seems I have to wait.

I pay, then go for a walk, crossing the Grand Ca.n.a.l by the Scalzi bridge and coming back the same way half an hour later an elegantly curved new one further up is only a week or two from being opened. I wander into the station, sit down in the cafe and order another Americano, the better to sip slowly. I have a faint desire to count how many platforms there are in the station, but it is residual, easily ignored. The phone rings a few times and its screen shows me the faces of the people calling: Annata, Claudio, Ehno. I don't answer.

I take several more walks around the western end of Cannaregio and the nearer parts of Santa Croce and sit in several more cafes, none too far from the Palazzo Chirezzia, keeping the vague hubbub in internal view at all times. I sit quietly, seemingly watching people, actually probing further into my own pasts.

I am sitting in a little tourist cafe on the Fondamenta Venier near the Ponte Guglie when I am recognised. I prepare for the worst, but it is just somebody who knows this body, this face, enquiring why I'm not at work this afternoon. I look furtive and embarra.s.sed and stick to vague generalities, mostly keeping my head down. The man nods, winks and taps me on the shoulder before he walks off. He thinks I am waiting for my lover. I drain my lemon tea and leave. I've had enough coffee.

I walk to another cafe, on the Rio Tera De La Madalena. A spritz this time, and some pasta. Staring at the spaghetti in my bowl, I drift into a strange trancelike state, at first wondering how many individual strands of the pasta lengths there might be in the bowl, then how many metres they would all add up to if laid end to end, then realising as I toy with the pale, soft strands, draping them languorously, voluptuously over the tines of my fork that their aggregated complexity is like the various entangled themes and episodes of my life: a swirling, hideously complicated, topologically tortuous, possibly knotted exposition of my very own reality lying dumped and glistening here in the moist coils lying on the plate before me, the sliced, abbreviated strands like the lives I have cut short, the glistening red of pa.s.sata adding an appropriately gory sheathing.

How many lives, I reflect. How many elisions and abbreviations, how many slack abandonments. And how many lives and deaths of my own self-elisions, lives lived briefly in the head and body of another then skipped away from, blithely flicked like dust from a sleeve. Every mission a suicide mission, every transition a transition from life to death (and back again, but still; a death).

I drift, almost without meaning to, into my private viewing theatre of the past. Here I am toddling, saddled on my mother's hip, dandled on my father's knee, going to school, leaving home, arriving at UPT, making friends, going to cla.s.ses, seeing Mrs M for the first time, studying, drinking, dancing, f.u.c.king, sitting exams, vacationing at home, f.u.c.king Mrs M for the first time, f.u.c.king Mrs M for the last time, standing drunk on a parapet in Aspherje looking out over the drop to the Great Park on the far side and wondering where she had gone, why she had abandoned me and whether I should just jump, and then falling backwards, too wasted to stand or balance or even cry. Here I am training to be a f.u.c.king multiversal ninja instead.

I can even see how I got where I am metaphysically, too, if you know what I mean; how and why I have changed and my abilities have developed over the last few months and weeks and days and even hours. I was always a natural, always a good learner, I always saw things clearly and I was just genetically predisposed to take transitioning and its a.s.sociate skills to places they had never been before, with the right sort of push. It doesn't even make me that special; untold trillions of similarly potentially gifted minds have lived and died on untold worlds all unknowing, their existences just never divined, never sniffed out by l'Expedience. And I can see how all those fraught, dangerous extra missions that Madame d'O sent me on were what made the difference, what proved me and tempered me and forced me to find and cultivate skills within that I did not know I had. I can see these traits, these attributes quite clearly in myself now and I suppose it is just possible that the right, properly attuned sort of person a Mulverhill, a d'Ortolan might have seen them or at least their potential in me years ago, if they were able to glance in at just the right angle.

I snap out of my reverie when the waiter nudges my seat deliberately, probably waking me from my dream.

The light has changed, the remnants of pasta are quite cold. I glance at my watch. It is fifteen past four o'clock. If I stick with this body then even if I try to run through the crowds, by the time I get to San Marco I'll be half an hour late. Maybe I should take the next right and get to the Grand Ca.n.a.l, call a water taxi. Or maybe I should do the smart thing and just swap bodies with somebody already in San Marco. I close my eyes, prepare to do whatever it was that let me flit across to this body.

And can't do it.

What? What's going on?

I try again, but still nothing. It's like I'm back to being blocked again. I'm stuck with this body.

I rise, throw down a handful of notes to cover the bill, start walking quickly in the direction of the San Marco and pull out the phone to call Adrian, wondering if I can still sense Concern people remotely like I could before, or if that's gone too, then stop in mid-b.u.t.ton press and mid-stride, stumbling to a halt as I realise, yes, I can still sense stuff and what I sense now is that a profound change has taken place within the Palazzo Chirezzia.

Something very strange and unpleasant has appeared in the small crowd of Concern people in and around the building, something bizarrely different, and not benign.

Who or what is that that?

Whatever or whoever it is, I have the disturbing feeling that it's what is blocking me, and also that as I look at it, it's looking straight back at me, with a kind of predatory fascination.

Adrian "h.e.l.lo. Who's this?"

"Ade, it's Fred, who you are coming to meet."

"Yeah, Fred, right. Look, mate, I'm en route, amn't I? Bit optimistic getting through the formalities and then from the old aeroporto to the city in forty-odd minutes. Sorry about that, but you know what it's like. In a water taxi wotsit now, though, making maximum speed. Driver says we should be there in about ten, fifteen minutes. That be all right?"

"Yes. Adrian, please tell your driver to take you to the Rialto. I'll meet you there. Not San Marco, I'm running late too and we should get to the Rialto at about the same time."

"Rialto, not San Marco. Gotcha. That's the bridge, innit?"