After Cora’s death I had a recurring dream. A heavy black cloud would pass over me. The cloud was evil. I don’t mean that evil was among the incidental properties of the cloud, like its color or its state of matter, but that the essence of the cloud was evil, traveling only in order to fall. As the cloud approached me, a change in the pressure of the dream medium would pin me down by the chest, leaving me unable to breathe. Only once the cloud had passed could I gather enough air to scream. And this was how I woke the next day.

I reached for the bottle of water on my bedside table, hoping I had not woken Sybil in the neighboring room, and then I practiced the breathing exercise I had learned from a friend in remission. A gap in the curtains cut the streetlight into an accusatory finger pointing across the floorboards. I closed my eyes and felt the air move through my body, displacing panic. The absence of Cora was every morning a shock.

Seeking solace in scale, I spun the material of my love for her into a silk thread that wrapped around every star in the galaxy. I thought about the microbes in my gut that would persist after my death as a diaspora, each of them finding new communities in foreign bodies and writing modernist novels in exile. With my mind’s eye I followed the beams of light carrying pictures of Cora on their journey through space, bent out of shape by gravitational fields but unimpeachably beautiful, until I came to a hubcap spinning on the forecourt of the petrol station next door to my childhood home and realized that I was dreaming. I woke for the second time into a room radiant with the morning. The spider that might, in combination with Sybil’s hallucinogens, have prompted these associations tiptoed across the white curtain rail, thinking itself unseen.

I took a cold shower to shock the night’s excesses out of my system. The Technicolor dust motes dancing through the kitchen suggested that this plan had not entirely succeeded; that the garden was a network of incandescent lineaments corkscrewing through the ground to feed on the greenish sins of the dead was enough, on balance, to confirm it. But the liveliness of this autumn day seemed benign, and I was pleased to take advantage of being awake before Rotimi to pack the stovetop machine with his superior coffee. When the music on the radio was replaced by dispatches from a strictly limited intervention I turned it off. The news was to be avoided.

As I searched for the expensive ginger-and-orange marmalade that I suspected Rotimi of hiding from me, it occurred to me that I should go to Tate Modern. I could spend that Saturday morning looking at Reith’s work in the collection, and thereby convince myself that its transcendence as art justified the compromise of my principles. Because I really was conflicted about whether to take the offer. I would be working on what I knew to be a branding exercise for a luxury property development, which was difficult to square with my stated position on the corruption of art by corporate interests. But it was becoming clear that I was a terrible teacher, I wanted a way back into the career I had abandoned in the crisis precipitated by Cora’s death, and the money was very good.

If you find the tinkle of empty nitrous oxide canisters when they are punted down the pavement beautiful, as I do, then London was very beautiful that morning. Trainers hung by their laces from telephone lines and a man with a heavily bandaged hand was eating peri-peri chicken outside the overground station. At Blackfriars I bought a croissant and carried it to the garden at St. Paul’s, where I sat on a bench, dedicated to Wisdom, beneath a window decorated with skulls. The sun was diffused by mottled clouds into a blueish glow.

Feeling philanthropic, I dropped some crumbs onto the grass so that a swarm of ants might share in my breakfast. A column was organized, by means I will never understand, from which one confused worker became detached. He wheeled round in panicked circles, and so I encouraged him onto my finger, rotating my hand to keep him from falling as I raised him to eye level. I told him that all would be well in this world, the best of all possible worlds, and then I lowered him to the ground.

That we cannot identify with other forms of consciousness might be the most moronic of the many moronic assertions of western philosophy, because the city was that morning shot through with electric sympathy. From the bridge I watched illuminated elevators rise like bright sap through glass buildings, while the river beneath me repeated and the birches on the bank swayed to the rhythms etched into their bark. Inside the museum, shoals of robot jellyfish floated on swivel-jointed propellors over schoolchildren, and the air was thick with patchouli. I felt, on the escalator, that I was perfectly in time.