Had lost a bit of momentum of late. Her career had stagnated somewhat, her YouTube channel had been a bust, every day thousands of unimaginative young people started their own channels and provided the world with product recommendations, cat films, comedy clips, and tips for makeup and removal, sports, and burial. It was yet again nothing that distinguished her from others. She had no particular gift. There must be someplace in the world for her talents, if only she knew where that was. Hannah wanted so badly to pursue something with fire. But nothing set her aflame. She tried to write but stopped again for lack of excitement. She had been able to convince the boss at the bar in Manchester where she had until recently worked to let her do a dance performance. Okay. So, a dance performance. Hannah had no idea. She asked a percussionist if he would accompany her. And then developed an idea to perform a life from birth to death. She rolled around on the floor halfheartedly, beat on her chest, balled herself up. And realized that it was complete rubbish. Hannah quit the job in Manchester, questions about her age had come up anyway. Underage was not a favored age on the job market just then. She didn’t look it, but she was still a damned child who should have been going to school and should have had foster parents or been in a juvenile facility. Luckily the country’s bureaucracy was being dismantled. Mass redundancies, digitalization, and so forth. And Hannah didn’t exist in the system. She didn’t have a bank account, no credit cards, no address of record. She was granted a spot in the homeless shelter, which would normally require a voucher, only because the building was being razed. She had simply gone into hiding among the throng of youth. Contact with any sort of officialdom would have meant the end of invisibility. Subject to official grasp, security forces, procedures. Hannah didn’t trust the state. Any good experiences she’d had with the state were negligible. There were doctors. There weren’t people lying along the roadside starving, but there definitely were people lying along the roadside. They lay around like rubbish, these people, but any efforts to dispose of the rubbish in shelters fell apart. Let them be, these people, so as to scare others. The way mafiosos hung their enemies from bridges in order to spread fear, the government left these people to lie around. Off you go, run, get yourself together, man, otherwise you’re next. Don’t complain, work, don’t create any costs, shut your mouth. Nobody starved yet. Maybe they got sick from malnutrition, maybe they got sick from stress, maybe they died at fifty, looking eighty, maybe they caught pneumonia that proved deadly. Maybe they died of an infection, maybe they hung themselves with less than a pound in their pocket because it was no kind of life. But no, nobody starved. “You see, nobody’s starving here, the world is improving, and outside the water is rising.” A reality TV star had become president in America. The Ku Klux Klan had an influx unlike anything since the 1960s, people gathered in Facebook groups and set fire to refugee shelters, and in Paris, tent encampments where thousands of homeless people and migrants lived—well, lived in a way—were cleared. Every second day there was a terrorist attack somewhere in Europe. Doesn’t matter.