Falling asleep with Walter's fantasies, and my own, all of them oiling the furthest reaches of my cranium, I was bound to wake up sweating, and so I did. Yet, while my mind was a cinemascape of porn this felt less like a dream, more a memory. But I couldn't be sure it was personal. Was I even in the dream? Jung would say I had tapped into an archetype and, certainly, the dream had the heavy, pounding quality that reminded me of dreams whenever I was ill. I rubbed my eyes, it was only 10 pm. I got dressed, went downstairs. I needed to leave the house because if I had tapped into a collective unconscious of porn, then I wanted to drive away, far away. Ideally, I wanted to give my mind away to the first stranger I met, like a free parking ticket. After all, why should I carry the burden? And maybe somebody could make better use of it. I started the car, flicked the headlights, and drove slowly, like a skunk. It was then, lit only by the streetlights on the seafront, that I saw Karen. She was jogging.

She had never been running before, or shown any interest in any sport, so to see her now, running hard in black hot pants felt like a betrayal. I followed her slowly. She had a gadget glowing on her arm. Was that her phone? On her other arm was another, smaller device.  She looked like a hospital patient on the run. What was she monitoring? Calories? Distance? Her distance over time, vis a vis the calories, tabulated to her body mass? What would all this information tell her that I could not? I wanted to run after her, clasp her arms, shake some sense into her. Her body had been many things to me, we carved our histories, our stories onto each other, it had never been a machine. Only my master had painted more beautiful bodies than hers. I was losing her all over again. I drove slowly, at a distance. The streetlight showed the definition of her calf muscles. And yet, I could see the attraction. A hard, anonymous beauty. She turned off on to the promenade and I lost sight of her.