He goes back to his car, where the dog is waiting for him.

I’m going mad, Achilles, he says. I’m afraid I am properly going mad.

‌Compassion

April has a dream. Dr Logan is sleeping in his car and there is a dog beside him. A liver-and-white coloured dog with long furry ears. The ether of April slides through the solid roof of the car and coalesces into the shape of herself in the back seat.

Where are you taking me? she asks. Dr Logan, still asleep, says nothing. The dog wakes up, muzzle still on its paws, and raises an eyebrow in her direction. She asks again, uses his name, Dr Logan, but he is solidly asleep. Under his eyelids, dreaming eyeballs jiggle like wakeful children mucking about under blankets.

She ghosts through the car and floats across a wide gravel drive to a house. She’s not sure whose house it is; it doesn’t feel like Dr Logan’s. No one answers the front door but the back door to the kitchen is open and there are people sitting down to breakfast. She knows them. Rick, her annoying former housemate, eating porridge. Luke Fisher, telling a joke to Naomi Bell. Other faces familiar from campus. Now she understands. It is everyone she killed on the bus. She goes to sit down among them, and they make space for her. Listening in to the joke, she realizes it is that one about God, about the man on the roof of his flooded house who is sent boats and helicopters, but refuses them all, saying, ‘God will save me.’ The waters rise, he dies, and when he gets to Heaven he says, ‘God, why didn’t you save me?’ and God says, ‘I sent you boats, I sent you helicopters…’

If God isn’t real, she says, why are they so many jokes about Him? But nobody hears her. They pass a teapot around the circle, anointing each cup. No one is angry with her. Even though they know she blew them up, they offer her toast, pass her the marmalade.

‌Professional

This time, he has no appointment. This time the woman on reception calls Dr Salmon and apologizes for the intrusion but there is a gentleman here, a Dr Logan, his name hitched like a trailer to the indefinite article as if she doesn’t recognize him, even the name of him. Perhaps he is unrecognizable. Perhaps three nights spent mostly in his car, as though on some interminable but motionless journey, are enough to rub off even a distinguished man’s distinguishing features.