Instead, the Shrander touched his shoulder. He felt himself lifted and moved until he hung above the breaking surf. He felt his limbs straightened firmly but gently as if by some expert masseur. He felt himself turn in the air, hunting like a compass needle. “This way?” said the Shrander. “No. This way.” And: “You can forgive yourself now.” A curious sensation—freezing yet warm, like the first touch of an aerosol anaesthetic—propagated itself across his skin, then, penetrating him through every pore, raced about inside, unblocking every cul-de-sac he had driven himself into in his forty years, relaxing the sore, knotted lump of pain and frustration and disgust—as clenched and useless as a fist, as impossible to modify or evict—his conscious self had become, until he could see and hear and feel nothing but a soft velvety darkness. In this he seemed to drift, thinking of nothing. After some time a few dim points of light appeared. Soon there were more of them, and more after that. Sparks, he thought, remembering Anna’s sexual ecstasy. Sparks in everything! They brightened, congregated, pinwheeled up over him, then settled into the furious churning patterns of the strange attractor. Kearney felt himself fall into it, and come apart slowly, and begin to lose himself. He was nothing. He was everything. He flailed with his arms and legs, like a suicide passing the thirteenth floor.

“Hush,” the Shrander said. “No more fear.” It touched him and said, “You can open your eyes now.”

Kearney shivered.

“Open your eyes.”

Kearney opened his eyes. “Too bright,” he said. Everything was too bright to see. The light roared in on him unconfined: he felt it on his skin, he heard it as a sound. It was light unburdened, light like a substance: real light. Great walls and arcs and petals of it hung and flickered, they hardened, they endured a moment, they tumbled and fell towards him, they somehow passed through him and were gone in a second, only to be replaced. He had no idea where he was. He felt the most extraordinary sense of surprise and wonder and delight.

He laughed.

“Where am I?” he said. “Am I dead?”

The vacuum around him smelled of lemons. It looked like roses. He felt it tearing at him, inside and out. There was a horizon, but it seemed too curved, too close.

“Where is this? Are these stars? Is there anywhere really like this?”

Now the Shrander laughed too.

“Everywhere is like this,” it said. “Isn’t that something?” Kearney looked down and found it standing at his shoulder, a small fat thing the shape of a woman, perhaps five foot six in height, its maroon wool winter coat buttoned tightly, its great bone beak tilted up to face the roaring, toppling sky. He had the feeling it would have blinked, had there been any eyes in its sockets. “That’s the one thing we never seemed to get,” it said: “How unpackable everything is.” Coloured ribbons fluttered and streamed from its shoulders in a completely invisible wind; while the hem of its coat trailed in the dust of some ancient rocky surface.