I started to re-contact the physical in a goddamned hospital room, my veins full of Percodan, my broken heart full of endless rue. I went back to the bubble of mind's protection, half opiate and half self-distilled denial, unwilling to return to the window opening on to that bitter world where Lucky's fleshly remnants lay in a cold-storage case five stories below me.

I could not have it; I would not have it; I shunned the guilt and the loss and the betrayal of the human soul that was balled up in that crushed carcass that had once housed so much daylight. I wept in my sleep, and half-slept, weeping again, and slept through my own weeping, and sought desperately for another window, something opening onto some other kind of world. But the place I was in was a trashy two-bit kind of place, dark, dank and cheap; and there was only one window, through which I would not look in my madness.

The body was too far off like to make any of my thoughts appear in any world you would call real. But where they mattered, they were real enough to drive you insane, and for a very long time, it seemed to me, that was not such a bad option.

If it hadn't have been for the tranqs dripping into my blood-flow I cannot say what I would have done. It would have been very, very ugly.