The dream had been horrid. In the dream, he was a total loser. And ugly. Suddenly it’s over. Now he’s only ugly. He hears gagging through the walls. Probably his Russian stepmother throwing up in the bathroom. She’s pregnant. Hurray. Thome will have a new sibling. He can eat it up in the cellar. Whose child is it, anyway? His father is seventy. He hears his desperate attempts to reach ejaculation every night. Nothing doing. Thome has taken over the camera in his father’s computer and watches him arranging his free time. His stepmother’s sexual exertions nearly elicited respect from him. That is, if his stepmother weren’t a Russian hooker. The stepmother wears latex and uses a whip. She has sex with a male sex robot with a forty-centimeter penis. She has sex with underage prostitutes of approximately eight years old.

THE EIGHT-YEAR-OLD PROSTITUTE

INTELLIGENCE QUOTIENT: under 100

HEALTH STATUS: multiple badly healed broken bones

Injuries in genital region

Syphilis—stage 2

DREAMS: none

HOBBIES: sleeping next to the heater and pretending it is a bear

Is ferried to Thome’s father’s house on Holland Park by a, let’s call him a minder. After an hour she is picked up again. And taken to her lodgings, which are on Regent’s Park. The owner of the eight-year-old prostitute is a Russian. Actually, you don’t say that anymore. Not politically correct. His wife is also from the Eastern Bloc. You don’t say that anymore, either. They are guests of the Empire. They are people.

(Shouted: “They are people!”)

As if that means anything, being a person. As if any person would care that other people are also living. They can’t even imagine the pain of someone who’s having a fingernail pulled out.

So

Now the usual story. As if there are only two types of CVs left in the kingdom—that of the upper class—

Which has to do with oily hair and wealth.

And the CV of the people.

Arrived here from somewhere or other, the result of some factor or other, and then a life whose only aim is survival.

The eight-year-old prostitute ran away from home because she was constantly beaten by her father after her mother died from jumping out a window. After the precipitous demise of her mother, which had to do with the fact that she could no longer stand her life, the eight-year-old prostitute kept looking for new places to hide in the little flat in order to protect herself from her father. The father of the eight-year-old prostitute was a cultural loser as far as modernity, who had no idea how his computer worked. A restless user. And angry. And with a hurt sense of manhood. He could momentarily regain his manhood when he ferreted out his daughter in her silly hiding places and beat her. It was—