I need to get some air. Excuse me a minute, I says. I go out through the lobby, and I walk past Jimmy The Grunt who is sitting there at the merchandise table with that fag in his mouth. I make for the men’s toilets. I can feel this cold sweat coming over me. My heart is beating out my chest. I stare at myself in the mirror. I’m getting Tommy’s heart, I’ve inherited Tommy’s bad heart, in the mirror. And now there’s something on the floor. Something is moving toward me across the floor. I can’t look round. I’m frozen to the spot. Then I feel its cold touch on my leg. Wrapping itself around my leg and moving up. Its cold muscle. Its coils around my waist and its run up my spine and I get the most feelings, the most feelings, like I could ejaculate and faint at the same time only to come, only to come, right through the middle of my forehead, stroking my spine and making my brain come.

Behind me, mirrored, the head of the snake, puffs, opens its black hood, my brain is going to fucking, spunk, bears fangs in its opened mouth, hoods its tongue, is spit on a mirror, and mirrored is miracle: because I know now why there are no snakes in Ireland. I know now. Saint Patrick told them to beat it because snakes move through time differently from us. Their tails are in the past but their heads are in the future. That’s why Saint Patrick told them to beat it. He had to get rid of them. Because if you can read the future then the game is up. And where would Ireland be without the game? But why me? I says to myself. Why has the snake come for me?

And then, the vision, iss, miracled:

*

I’m sitting here, in this lonely prison cell. I’m sitting here in this fucking cage and I’m telling you all about it. I’m remembering something that happened in the future but that is taking place right now as I’m telling you this, in the past. It’s like I’m in two places at once and they are both here, right now, in this one place. I walk back through the lobby in this double-minded snake state. I don’t know if anybody else can see it. Or the stains on my trousers. I walk past Jimmy The Grunt and he gives me a grunt, grunt.

Your man Del Brogan brings his daughter on. His daughter Eden, in a chair, onstage. This is my heart, he says. Give me a fucking break, Barney says. A little girl can be your heart, for god’s sake, I says to him. In this snake glow everything seems perfect. It is here right Now. Your man Del Brogan singing to his daughter is addressing his heart, addressing his fucking heart and no doubt about it, his heart is there in front of him with a white dress on and wearing knee socks just as surely as if somebody had slipped their fingers into the flesh of his chest and torn his heart free of its veins and its arteries and presented it to him, right then and there, his daughter, singing to the audience, is his heart to himself,