BILL TURNS his head so his ear is pressed against the floor. It is entirely possible to slip through the decades in between these floors. Travel forward or back in time. There is the voice of a woman. A girl child and an older sister maybe, it is hard to work out. Someone should let that parrot out the window. A bird is not fit to see these kinds of things. The past is superimposing itself on the present. He could try to work out what the great unconscious is trying to convey but there is no logic in it. His lover is going through all of his collected futurism images. He throws his fingers out. Still tripping. He holds them up in front of his naked body. Waves them back and forward. Selects another image. He holds up each picture for Bill to inspect. There is a family on a boat. The mother has an antenna growing out of her head. Then there is a glass split-level house. His tackle sways as he raises each image. His lover looks so serious as he inspects a picture of great domed worlds with trees in them. He stares for a long time at spaceships that look like electric jellyfish in the great black deep. There is a hospital using centrifugal force to counter ageing. Spaceships to fly home from the opera. A self-driving car whose passengers look out the windows forlornly. There are networks of multiple tube trains under cities, and telephones where you can see the person you are talking to. His favourite is a tall tattooed woman wearing a glass space helmet. He looks at it for a full ten minutes and then lifts it up to the daylight.

– Tomorrow land is going to be so bright, John!

– Skies of fire, space invasions.

– Robots everywhere! We already have those, you know.

– Where?

– Your clock, that was the first robot.

John looks across at the kitchen clock as if seeing it for the first time.

– Or the washing machine, all the gadgets designed to do jobs we don’t want to do are robots. They are building cars, fixing brains, they’ll be writing all the words for us next, retraining us to be like them – robot poets to replace the real messy imperfect originals like me.

– Bill, do you want to go tae the movies?

– Why are you whispering?

– Am I?

– You are, John, yes. We will go to the cinema but I am too high right now. Is it true?

– What?

– They used to bury cats in these big old walls?

– Aye, they did that.

His lover gestures wildly at the wall.

– Why?

– To ward off evil.

– Funny way to ward off evil if you ask me. Not that I love cats, I really don’t.

– I want to take you to the Dominion. It is a nice cinema. Mr Burroughs, would you like to go to the movies and hold hands with me?

– What’s on?