He turned to face the teens standing silently with beer glasses in their hands. They didn’t seem to be waiting for anything, were without thought or action, completely given over to the trickle of time, and he wondered in what sense they belonged to reality, the reality of reconstruction, of the unleashed restoration of misunderstood facts, the abstract reality of resurrected cities and the ruthless rhythm with which they sprouted from the mounds of rubble.

Nothing is resurrected. Nothing but the chinking of the cash registers, the banging on the bars of the cage you inhabit, the prisoner of money. You can’t take a single step without money running through your hand, every move you make is immediately confirmed by the clatter of the register that lends it a definitive air, checks it off, establishes the causal short circuit that every action must be immediately followed by a payment: you pay and get paid—even for murder—that’s how every act is transacted, even the most inhuman acts, with every activity thus completed, the compelling certainty grows and finally incorporates even the initial impulse to act, the motivating need or desire, into the causal circle of being paid and having to pay—the desire inspired by the cherry-cheeked daydream of a creature with the twin faucets and their sterile promise of pleasure: that great household teat is only there to fool you, lure you into the fallacy that the more you consume, the cheaper it is—the certainty that you must pay is not thereby cancelled: on the contrary, its rhythm is accelerated, more and more harrying and harried. Your scream into the starry sky merges with organs, bells, vaquero-guitars, revolver shots, factory whistles, lonely locomotive shrieks, packs of moonstruck saxophones, kettledrums and trumpets, Jericho trumpets that bring the walls of cities tumbling down, you gasp and sob, your voice quavers and shakes, gurgles and cracks, buffeted back and forth in ecstatic convulsions, you’re a world-war trembler swatting at invisible flies, foaming at the mouth, sweat dripping from your Mexican tresses in the merciless beat, your mangy homesickness for some unseen land of suckle and reassurance, for cities as many-towered as Monsalvat, for all the cities you’ve known and lost, all you’ve not known and lost, the blues of my life, my lost, squandered, misplaced fatherlands on the mangy crust of this planet hurtling through space: no confluence or interweaving of events is permitted unless it’s been chopped up and riveted back together by the bang of a rubber stamp—payment received!—no longer do actions blossom from mysterious sources and sow their seeds in the wind that carries them where it will, no longer can an idle whim connect events in a round dance, the staccato of the rattling cash registers grinds them into chaff, a sum of separate processes, each of which demands to be dealt with at once, and woe betide you should you evade paying immediate attention, woe betide you should you break free, delay or even prevent the short circuit of performance and payment, woe betide you should you withdraw your deeds and wishes from this universal law, do something without money, wish for something without money: you’ll be as culpable as if you’d interfered in the harmony of Creation: they’ll pursue you like a blasphemer against almighty God, someone whose example—God forbid—could be imitated by others, by several others, possibly by many, even by all, could lead to the planet being thrown off course, the planet that’s harried, clanking and rattling, through space by the pulse of thudding cash registers, in cosmic rock ’n’ roll, while on its crust the rabble of humanity slaughters and strangles one another, one tribe wipes out the other, one people lets another bleed to death ad maiorem dei gloriam: slaves to the great mammon—thou shalt not sin against it! Otherwise, continents would escape from the nets spun by airlines, the coral coasts would drift away from the iceberg-calving polar glaciers, Karachi and Caracas would separate from their embrace of fervent agreement that consumption must rise whatever the cost, because cheaper consumption means increased consumption, Dallas (Texas) and Paris (France) would fly apart with explosive speed . . .