Over the next x number of hours I experience an interminable catalogue of segued hallucinations. The quiddity of myself and my many hopes dissolve into the sheets and then re-form in the fueled visions of Charlie bending over me; of an ownerless leg gamboling around the Janus locker room, trying to find me; of my Clean Getaway, pilotless, stalled out somewhere in the doldrumsy Atlantic, idle as a painted fucking ship upon a painted fucking ocean.

Through the diaphanous, slugsilver webbing laid over my vision I also see people. Their features are anamorphic and disturbing, jack-o’-lanterny. Outside my door there is a matching set of cops standing sentry in a discouraging, immovable repoussoir. Next to me, gurneyside, is a looming Detective Nunes, the tissue of her neck hard and pebbled like sharkskin. Her mouth moves but I can’t interpret the noises. Her voice has a faraway, semimystical, didgeridoo drone. It is, no doubt, meaningful—the expression is as grim as a Schmidt-Rottluff— but the meaning is lost in my logjammed brain.

Behind her is another image. Sitting on the bench outside of my room’s window, hanging on to an aged mop, is a guy who appears to be roughly the size of a tugboat. Underneath his orderly whites he is wearing a powder blue shirt that matches precisely his pleated turban. I’ve seen him before but can’t quite place him. He smiles at me covertly and gives me a crabbed, secret wave, as if we’re in study hall and he has something totally important to say, dude, but doesn’t want to get busted.

I reprimand my subconscious and submit a requisition for better visions. I squeeze shut my eyes—either real ones or dream ones—and tell it, Charlie, for God’s sake. Pretty please, give me Charlie.

When I scrape together enough consciousness to open my eyes, I again see Detective Nunes. How do I know it’s the corporeal Nunes and not the wraith? The odor of menthol and pencil shavings, the drop in air pressure, the fact that she is shaking me rudely.

“I know you’re awake, Starks. Do yourself a favor and get up.” Nunes bends over me with hieratic menace. She is the biggest thing in the room, with the strongest gravity. She has the larger-than-life presence, the absolute centrality—the outraged divinity, even—of a truly pissed-off Christ in a Byzantine mosaic. Not answering snappily does nothing to appease her.