Peter’s mother listens to the two men talk, she looks at her nails, she’s bored. It hasn’t come to pass, the sense of delight she had promised herself her life would deliver. She’d been able to get the Russian to marry her. With a prenuptial agreement, of course. The price was higher than she had been able to conceive of. She had to tolerate him, adore him, listen to him, and laugh at his jokes. The light flickers. It goes out. The blinds close on their own. It makes no difference. Peter’s mother stares into the darkness with her eyes wide and doesn’t know why of all things she isn’t able to be happy amid all this affluence, in the wonderful world of infinite material bounty. If it’s the case that poverty doesn’t make you happy and wealth doesn’t either, what else is there?

There is nothing to do

For the moment

And

PETER

Walks through the city, which always has the feel of afternoon, always this milky in-between light and an in-between temperature that’s a bit too cool to be comfortable. People move in a decidedly orderly fashion. None of the end-times utopias of the last few decades have come to pass. All the films, TV programs, books, speeches and essays, the alarmists and TED Talkers had been wrong. Or utterly correct, because they’d reached the goal of raising people’s fear to a chronic condition that completely trashed all remnants of logical and empathetic thought. When, alongside the usual fucked-up shit that’s left in human brains by click-oriented news, you hear from all the channels that are actually supposed to provide relaxation that everything is even worse than you can imagine with your limited powers of imagination, when you have the demise of your own existence sketched out for you daily by accredited experts and intellectuals, it’s barely possible for anyone to develop a sense of calm anymore.

So now. Well, what do we see? Do we see dumpster fires, burned-out cars along the side of the road? And speaking of roads, are there holes opening up where animals that no longer exist can disappear? Do we see people with fully automatic weapons in leather rags gnawing on corpses? Or do we watch orderly, quiet electric vehicles moving along at a walking pace? People who keep their unadorned clothing clean, wait for the WALK signal to cross the road, don’t push and shove, greet each other, shop peacefully in self-service shops; do we see clean buildings, a milky sky, and relaxation?

Because even for those whose abilities are of only rudimentary importance to society, a relaxed life is on offer—

There is the

MIDDLE-AGED TEACHER

HEALTH STATUS: well-balanced acid-base metabolism

HOBBIES: a true porridge aficionado

USEFULNESS: none

EXTRAS: so average that you could form new people in his image

“Good idea—shall we?”