Unwillingly, I recalled my ludicrous fantasy of endless carefree Sunday afternoons with Gina. Why had I ever imagined that she’d want to sit by a fountain in Epping with me, for the rest of her life? How could I have believed, for so long, that she was happy … when all I’d made her feel, in the end, was ignored and invisible, suffocated and trapped?

My notepad beeped. I slid it from my pocket and Sisyphus announced, “WHO epidemiology statistics for March have just been released. Notified cases of Distress now number five hundred and twenty-three. That’s a thirty per cent increase in a month.” A graph appeared on the screen. “There have been more new cases reported in March than in the previous six months combined.”

I said numbly, “I don’t remember asking to be told this.”

“August 7th last year. 9:43 p.m.” The hotel room in Manchester. “You said, ‘Let me know if the numbers ever really take off.’”

“Okay. Go on.”

“There have also been twenty-seven new journal articles published on the topic since you last enquired.” A list of titles appeared. “Do you want to hear their abstracts?”

“Not really.”

I glanced up from the screen, and noticed a man working at an easel on the far side of the square. He was a stocky Caucasian, probably in his fifties, with a tanned, lined face. Since I wasn’t eating, I should have been making good use of my time by replaying Henry Buzzo’s lecture to myself, or diligently plowing through some relevant background material. After a few minutes contemplating this prospect, I got up and walked around to take a look at the work-in-progress.

The picture was an impressionistic snapshot of the square. Or partly impressionistic; the palms and the grass looked like patches of green light caught reflected on an uneven windowpane, through which the rest of the scene was viewed – but the buildings and pavement were rendered as soberly as they would have been by any architect’s computer. The whole thing was executed on Transition – a material which changed color under the influence of an electric stylus. Different voltages and frequencies made each type of embedded metal ion migrate toward the surface of the white polymer at a different rate; it looked almost like oil paint appearing from nowhere – and I’d heard that creating a desired color could be as much of an art as mixing oils. Erasure was easy, though; reversing the voltage drove all the pigments back out of sight.

Without pausing to glance at me, the artist said, “Five hundred dollars.” He had a rural Australian accent.

I said, “If I’m going to get ripped off, I think I’ll wait for a local to do it.”

He gave me a mock-wounded glare. “And ten years doesn’t qualify me? What do you want? Citizenship records? ”