‘Yes,’ whispered the alien on the pallet. It thrashed about briefly, sending up a cloud of feathers. ‘I am. I am here.’

The assistant maintained an office on the fifth floor of the building at Uniment & Poe. She had staff, she had a budget, she had a ’52 mint-blue Cadillac roadster in the parking garage: no one knew how she achieved this kind of success. You saw the Cadillac outside the bar they called the Tango du Chat where she often spent an evening; two or three times a week she would leave it at the kerb on C-Street and enter Cedar Mountain, an upscale tank farm where they kept several personalised immersive art experiences on file for her, based on the life of a fictitious 20th century housewife called Joan. As Joan, the assistant cooked meals, used ‘cleaning products’ and serviced her man 1956-style, which generally meant he grunted a lot and came on her leg (despite its exoticism, she found this aspect of the experience profoundly calming). Today, though, she chose another Cedar Mountain favourite: the five-star Room 121, based on a tableau of the same name by Sandra Shen, in which she could be a woman – unnamed but still perhaps 20th century – ‘alone’ in a hotel.

It was night. She was lounging in the tropical heat of a single room. She was at the window, a tall woman whose eyes were blue, whose age was hard to tell, whose clothes – a black two-piece with lightly padded shoulders, a striped grey and black blouse of some glazed material – scarcely hid an untidy sexuality. She never did much in the room. She drank rum; she stared out the window, thinking that wherever you are at night in the city you can always see, beyond the roof of the next building, the faint glow of floodlights. The radio played a musing version of a popular tune, `Rhapsody in Blue’. It was all as it should be. It was leading to the moment when her hands went impersonally into her underwear, when it would seem to the assistant that she was not so much having sex with herself as with the room, the song, the hotel: with every object in that instance of the liquid world.