I dreamt very vividly too, as if that white-blue light of the moon was shining down through my layers and illuminating my past, penetrating parts of my crust that no run-of-the-mill night, not even a run-of-the-mill full moon night, could normally penetrate. I was back right in the meat of a night not unlike this, a long long time ago. I thought I was old at the time, but I was not. This is how ageing works, again, and again, and again, until you die. OMG, can you believe I’m actually twenty-one? I’m so old! OMG, can you believe I’m actually forty? OMG, can you believe I’m actually 900? I’m so old! OMG, can you believe I’m actually 5,807? I’m so old! As I dreamt about the night, I refelt so much of the fear I felt on it, and was scared by the fear, but I also refelt how alive I felt, and I was more scared still by that. Men were killing each other on my flanks and my knee and my left knuckle and all six of my bums and my eyebrow and my clitoris and my bollocks – although not my bullocks, who had all fled to low ground – and the men had been killing each other for two days and even though it was the deepest part of the night they were still killing each other and the fierce light of the moon was making it easier for them to kill each other and it seemed, although at first some of them had been killing each other slightly reluctantly, more out of a sense of duty than anything, now those same men were taking more pleasure in killing each other. One group of men had originally ambushed and cornered another group of men near a thick, impenetrable stand of trees on my aorta. The group of men who had ambushed the other group of men had less refined accents than the other group of men, more odorous hair and beards, but that was not so noticeable as it initially had been, and no longer seemed to matter; they were all just men, with urine-splashed trousers and swollen bloody eyes and half-legs and three-quarter arms and strewn intestines and a lust for power disguised as a lust to stay alive and a lust for staying alive disguised as a lust for power and women at home they wished were holding and caressing them and nobody really knew who was who any more and what it was all for. I was terrified, watching these men. And now dreaming about that night I felt that terror again and I felt that aliveness and I felt what I felt in the weeks following it, when all the men had died or fled or dragged themselves off to expire elsewhere, when the liquid from their bodies seeped into me, which was a different kind of aliveness, and an amazing kind of rejuvenation and energy and, yes, virility. Startling, startling virility. And then I felt momentarily ashamed but then I thought: Why? I am not hurting anyone; I am not even pressing myself into someone and being told to go to a workroom and calm myself down. I was just feeling what I felt.