I watched the molecules interlocking, I watched the merciless random dance. This was what I was – whether it gave me any comfort to understand it, or not. The same physics which had kept me alive for thirty-six years might or might not casually destroy me – but if I couldn’t accept that simple, obvious truth, I had no business explaining the world to anyone. Solace and redemption could screw themselves. I’d been tempted by the Ignorance Cults – and maybe I half understood what drove them, now – but what did they have to offer, in the end? Alienation from reality. The universe as an unspeakable horror to be endlessly denied, shrouded in saccharine artificial mysteries, every truth subjugated to doublethink and fairy tales.

Fuck that. I was sick from too little honesty, not too much. Too many myths about the H-word, not too few. I would have been better prepared for the whole ordeal by a lifetime spent calmly facing the truth, than a lifetime spent rehearsing the most seductive denials.

I watched a schematic of the worst-case scenario. “If antibiotic-resistant, Mexico City V. cholerae succeed in crossing the blood-brain barrier, immunosuppressants can limit the fever – but bacterial toxins themselves are likely to cause irreversible damage.”

Mutant choleragen molecules fused with neural membranes. The cells collapsed like punctured balloons.

I still feared death as much as ever – but the truth had lost its sting. If the TOE had taken me in its fist and squeezed … at least it had proved that there was solid ground beneath me: the final law, the simplest pattern, holding up the world in all its strangeness.

I’d hit bottom. Once you’d touched the bedrock of the underworld, the foundations of the universe, there was nowhere else to fall.

I said, “That’s enough. Now find something to cheer me up.”

“How about the Beat poets?”

I smiled. “Perfect.”

Sisyphus ransacked the libraries, and played them reading their own works. Ginsberg howling “Moloch! Moloch!” Burroughs rasping “A Junkie’s Christmas” – all severed limbs in suitcases, and scoring the immaculate fix.

And best of all, Kerouac himself, wild and melodic, stoned and innocent: “What If The Three Stooges Were Real?”

Afternoon sunlight slanted across the ward and brushed the side of my face, bridging distance, energy, scale, complexity. This was not a reason for terror. It was not a reason for awe. It was the most ordinary thing imaginable.

I was as ready as I’d ever be. I closed my eyes.

#

Someone prodded my shoulder, and said for the fourth or fifth time, “Wake up, please.”

I’d lost all choice in the matter. I opened my eyes.

A young woman stood beside me, no one I’d seen before. She had serious, dark brown eyes. Olive skin, long black hair. She spoke with a German accent.

“Drink this.” She held out a small vial of clear liquid.

“I can’t keep anything down. Didn’t they tell you?”

“This, you will.”