Some weekends as the visit and ‘investigation’ dragged on Jobbin considered going home to the capital for a break of routine but he could not afford the MegaBus and stayed to work on what he called envelope documents. Spare evenings he often returned to Café Myopia armed only with his boredom and his questions, sitting in the same corner with one drink in front of him like a homeless sad man, waiting in vain to see if the tall woman would return. Late at night Jabbin would return back to the Hotel which was meantime bought out by a franchise and partially refurbished, slipping disappointed past the reception and the crowd of men still generally laughing and lounging about in their uniforms of bellboy and concierge etc.

It was after one such trip to Café Myopia that Jobbing decided to take a nightcap drink in Hotel bar he had not frequented before. Boarding a wooden elevator to 22nd floor he leaned on the walls while it ascended in slowmo, staring down his own reflection in the burnished brass and dirty mirrors, feeling like a film star, looking like a fool. As the elevator rose the Muzak played Last Waltz of the Night Brigade and How Deep Is Your Darkness by Mary Anne Boelyn (?) and also The Rudderless Jackass of Old Mexico and something that sounded like a remix of Splinters in the Eyes by Donkey Crotch. When it (the elevator and the song) eventually stopped he waited for doors to open and then stepped out in a cold hallway the walls of which were unadorned with the pictures and other things that went up all around the rest of the hotel. From the far end of the corridor Jobbin could hear faint music, and what he thought were voices which he stepped towards, not seeing that behind him, from the very shallows of the shadows, stepped a person who struck him immediately from behind to knock him unconscious to the ground.

Then it was ‘lights out for Jobin’ © and no mistake.

*

Several more years passed where Jobbin was in a coma, of which not much is known beyond detail medical records of his intravenous fluid intake, blood pressure, bowel movements etc. Nurses and doctors in the hospital of that town came and went and the wards were slowly privatised, the part Jobin inhabited slowly asset stripped of all and everything but the bed and the curtains and an occasional visit by one of the older doctors not fully up to seed with the modern day of doing things.