Up in the sky a drone approaches with the typical lawn clipper sound. Don tries to blend in with the floor. Private drones had been banned by then. If you spot one of the little comrades on the horizon these days, it can be assumed that it’s a government surveillance overflight. Drones. Right. Don sits up and thinks she’d like to smoke a cigar. Just because it would make a cool image. And to poke around in a campfire with a stick. Don likes the night. She likes to be alone at night, nothing to do, as if she has things figured out. She likes the night and the idea that millions of people are lying down in the city, dreaming of solutions.

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CARL

HEALTH STATUS: high blood pressure risk group

POLITICAL ATTITUDE: conservative

POTENTIAL FOR MANIPULATION: easily susceptible to right-wing propaganda

SEXUAL ORIENTATION: porn

Who had worked as a foreman on the building. Until he’d been replaced by a Polack. Which is why he’s against Islam. And against all that shit. For which Carl has a theory. In his opinion, the imbalance, the lack of respect, the poverty, change as a background noise, all of it was the result of women in the workplace. It stood to reason, after all, that a new generation of mothers had been raised who preferred to go to work rather than bother with bringing up growing—go ahead, say it—children. Carl didn’t have a wife. He was ill. He had some fucking disease, the name of which he could never remember and which, given the current state of science, could be cured with a one-week course of tablets. Could be. Which didn’t happen, because it was more lucrative to support Carl’s lifelong decline with medication. So no more work because of the illness and the Polacks. And now. No idea. Cunts. The latest thing was that they wanted men to have themselves sterilized because the birth control pill had side effects. For example, women on the pill had no sexual desire and got cancer—“Divine retribution,” mumbled Carl, thinking that was just the sort of madness that would lead to the end of the world. Women who fucked their way around and men who weren’t supposed to come anymore. Carl had lost three molars to his nightly grinding, and he hadn’t recovered them in his stool.

Carl