For the most part he thinks about a sentence he’d like to say for so long that everyone else has already long since moved on from the topic his sentence is about; indeed, Peter is still thinking about the sentence when the others have gone to bed and he’s staring into the fire alone. He wakes up with the sentence. The next morning. And is unhappy. Because it was a beautiful, a true sentence, which he then has to bury.

Consequently Peter has the crazy idea to hug one of the three others. Then he tries to imagine what it would be like to spread out his arms, to go up to people and in the wake of a successful hug to bury his face in the body of a stranger. He senses how nice human contact would feel, how warm and safe it must feel—and then he gets sick. And he simmers with rage about the inability to trust, and finds no consolation in punching walls.

Otherwise, everything is fine.

“No, really, I’m doing fine,” Peter would say if he were to talk to someone. No, ridiculous, of course he wouldn’t say anything at all, he’d freeze up. Outside the group. That he’d grown accustomed to.

He hasn’t grown accustomed to the city. To the mass of humanity. When Peter is out in the city, he gets dizzy. He has to be out in the city because they’ve agreed on this silly plan for revenge. In a faraway life. And because he can’t express himself, because if he could he would say. “Come on, let’s cut the crap. Let’s cut the childish bullshit. We’re busy, we have a home, a life, we have to steal credit cards, go shopping, cook, make sure we don’t get stupid in our little criminal existence. We have to understand what is really happening in this country, and we shouldn’t get bogged down in some silly cops-and-robbers game.”

But

He doesn’t say this. Surely he’s mistaken. Surely he’s just sick. He’s nuts, like always. Peter is nuts. And he stops. On one of the screens an interruption. An accident. In which all occupants of a bus have been killed.

Just look. The blue bus is hoisted from the water, divers bring corpses to the riverbank. Passersby stare. Stand and stare and are captured by the typically human lust to look at accidents and bodies, the shudder of a brief understanding of the transience of it all.

Some have their mouths open. It’s being filmed. But that’s normal. It has become normal to film every death, every disaster.