They'd left the place littered with the abstract white forms of the foam packing units, with crumpled plastic film and hundreds of tiny foam beads. The Ono-Sendai; next year's most expensive Hosaka computer; a Sony monitor; a dozen disks of corporate-grade ice; a Braun coffee maker.

They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin. Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning out micron by micron, he hallucinate…

'Hey,' he'd said, 'it's me. Case.' The old eyes regarding him out of their dark webs of wrinkled flesh. 'Ah,' Ratz had said, at last, 'the artiste.' The barten…

The past is past, the future unformed. There is only the moment, and that is where he prefers to be.