Seven days after undergoing the process, he is padding along with the dog under a canopy of leafless branches. Coming up over a rise, the low winter sun blinks at him through a stand of hazel. He stops and moves his head, this way and that, so that it flashes at him like smugglers’ lanterns in the sea stories of his boyhood. He sucks in the long, long breath of a man who has been drowning and, when he lets the breath go, there are tears.

How miraculous it all is. This earth and everything that grows and grazes upon it. This planet, whose placement in relation to the sun could not be even fractionally closer to, or further away from, its perfectly sized star without life being impossible. The sun itself, feeding every living entity with light alone. The design of his perfectly adapted body, which breathes and digests and repairs itself without his direction or knowing. And more miraculous even than all of these, this sense of being, of being a being, inhabiting this peculiar island of conscious awareness.

And consciously aware of what? Suddenly, everything. A strange open buzz in the centre of his chest like the fist of his heart finally unfurled and plugged into some universal power source. At the sun’s periphery, particles, he can see actual particles of energy, streaming down onto the grassy clearing, connecting with the grass. Instantly, all is particular; shaken out of its packets into a vast network of energetic charges. He can sense it all. He too is part of it: a vast and endless arrangement assisting itself, translating one form of energy into another. One giant organism that connects all living and non-living things, exchanging sunlight for heat, movement for sound, so that even the shush of the cars on the road that cuts through the forest half a mile beyond is the whispered transaction of energy into energy; nothing lost, only transformed, and now into his ears, forming thought. For is it not true, as Gabrielle said, that an electron can be part of your own eyeball one second and, in the next, jangle the bell of a child’s bicycle in Holland, kiss a coffee cup in Boston, harden a crab claw in Australia? He looks down at Achilles. She too is knitted into the fabric of him, as he is knitted into the fabric of the forest and everything beyond. Somehow, the joy of his understanding has reached her tail and is thumping the leaves, every millipede and woodlouse in her wagging radius drummed into the same knowing.