The streets aren’t too bad, people move swiftly in even files on the proper side of the pavement, slip across the street hastily when they think they’re safe—not many dare. I want to save time by crossing the walled square diagonally but the prisoners are doing exercises there in the center and I have to go along the edges. The supervisor is a willowy older woman with a shaved head, who is surrounded by a few officers and a group of soldiers.

On her orders, a number of prisoners in white rags are compelled to lie on their stomachs. The soldiers stand over them and shoot them, through them into the ground; the noise is like a row of stitches popping. Now she directs another group of prisoners to take the bodies and pile them into a hopper set into a wall.

Out of my way a little more to avoid proximity of a loud homeless man, who harangues the crowd from this street corner. He is a local fixture, tolerated by the authorities because he exhorts passersby to remember the indignities and injustices perpetrated against us by our jealous enemies. His eyes rustle icily over me as I go by.

What I didn’t get at the office I couldn’t get, not anywhere. What I see is all a white that makes me feel a wave of illness, and I avoid the thought. A young man emerges from a knot of people drinking from steaming mugs, going round to greet another warmly, and a wearily smiling dog trails after him.

Gradually the crowd around me is stirring ... the bull-like bellow of the claxons, a pulsing, dead white howl.

Chaos, shouts and running; prisoners have escaped, armed themselves. I make my way to the side but the alleys are filling too—I shove through a doorway and race through empty halls, I come out in a darkened shop with cold steel hoppers, remnants of ice, odor of fish. Out the door—keep moving—I pass a mob that have set on a couple of prisoners—I can smell their blood. People are running by with hands that drip red. I want to join them, but the prisoners are dead. Police rush to the windows of their towers actually colliding with the ledges in their haste, their eyes staring they move frantically like electrocuted men yacking and fumbling with their rifles, so frenzied they can barely work them, fire them randomly in the direction of the fleeing prisoners, twitching hands jerk at the controls they fire faster than they can aim—the gun goes off before they’ve even got the site to their eyes—