They were now selling a cleaning substance, that cleaned everything from grease on stoves, to cars, to windows, without the need for water, just pollute yourself with this killer chemical. What did it clean out of your lungs?

And instead of growing closer, they grew further apart, after Jacob was born; Clarissa seemed to lose interest in her job, which she quit, and in her relationship with him. Post-natal depression, it was put down to. She was competing with him in the brain stakes. No contest. Ever, although still taking the pills, found himself doing everything with Jacob, and somehow it made up for the soulless immorality, yes, he had started to feel that now, of his work. She looked after Jacob in the day, but was more than happy to do nothing the minute Ever returned from work. And then came The Black Wednesday. His own personal Black Wednesday.

The price on the left-hand side was not dropping so rapidly for the cleaning product, as there were only ten, seven, two. All gone. Clean out of cleaner. Ever felt he should have got some, felt a pang of disappointment that he had missed the opportunity.

*

Ever wanted to speak to Clarissa and Jacob.

In a moment of intense isolation and fear that they would be lost forever and that he would never see them again, or he would fail to recognise their faces. A completely irrational thought but what if his face blindness, whatever the fuck it was called, he’d forgotten the name again, what if it worsened into a permanent state? He looked for his phone on the bedside table and then with the dawn coming up he could see the detail of the room forming like a polaroid coming to life and searched for his trousers, pants as they called them. He was in pants country. He could find nothing. The sweating returned, they had robbed him, stolen, taken his belongings, he had no contact with the world, he saw the phone by his bed, the landline, and tried to dial Clarissa’s number but couldn’t make it through: some idiot voice telling him that his call could not be completed as dialled. Was it an incorrect number? She offered him the option of trying again and he did try again. And then the panic truly set in. He leapt off the bed and stormed out of his room.

*

The man stood in the centre of the big brown room.

The Los Angeles dawn was taking the cold desert night away and warming the air with the first glow of sun, drying the damp that covers the world outside; he stood naked in the room. Cold, both from temperature drop and anger. He was screaming, screaming about his phone and how they had stolen it from him, and he was trapped, and his voice was developing the break of sadness that now joined the anger.

It was the ictal phase of a seizure.