By the time he arrived back in California, Hunter was experiencing peripheral hallucinations, not a full-blown usurpation of the visual field, but the constant flicker of mistaken identities on the edge of his vision. The shadows of camels and axe murderers thrown up by the headlights on the hillsides and the rocks, as Raoul drove him back from Carmel to Apocalypse Now, were less disturbing than the improbable mouse that had just scurried across the empty seat beside him and disappeared when he turned to confront it. He had been to New York, Oxford, London, Assisi, Paris, London and New York again and was now, just ten days later, back on the West Coast. He had powered on because there were so many meetings, decisions, time zones and acquisitions, and so much pressure to be charming or ball-breaking, as the occasion required, that sleep had been sent to the back of the line again and again. Bullying his body with prescription medication made each collapse more brutal than the last. On the flight from New York, he felt as if a mafia enforcer had thrown him out of a helicopter into a rat-infested landfill site, among shards of broken china and twisted metal, cushioned only by illegal hospital waste and bulging diapers. It was a feeling he was prepared to do almost anything to change. He definitely had a problem accepting any form of disappointment, and he had made the stupid decision to pop another pill. Now he was paying the price, not only with hallucinations of scuttling mice, but also with the hordes of barbarian thoughts pouring through the undefended gates of his editorial intelligence and vandalising even the most basic concepts until they looked unintelligible and menacing.