One night he sent an e-mail with an attachment, the document he had sent Simon. I opened it avidly, and at first, yes, this was the voice that had possessed me for years, this was that world, here is a Brixton squat party, here he goes home with a girl and smokes heroin, here he takes a late-night bus with a tart with a crack habit, here is the voice that melts the icebound brain.

I read on. I don’t know. Here are accounts of deaths he covered at the Coroner’s Court for a news agency, and these are in the cold dispassionate prose of Flaubert. Here are other pieces, a writer mainlining Burroughs or Miller or Genet. A writer who can write like Flaubert and Burroughs has something bigger than a reader of e-mails would guess, but I don’t know how to wheel and deal for it. Not with Simon, not with my sharpshooting friends, not with the betazoid. I don’t think you can wheel and deal with Simon by mentioning Flaubert. I think Flaubert is the kiss of death. I think Zola is the kiss of death. I think Burroughs is the kiss of death in the world of wheeler-dealers, which is the only world I know.