Another euthanasia today. I’ve lost count of which one this week. The Underground, whether it likes it or not, is travelling south faster with each passing day. It’s exhausting. All the more so as the weather forecasts for the coming weeks grow increasingly dire. The day has doubled; it is now forty-eight hours long, and still lengthening. We are not getting enough sleep, dear neighbours from Victoria line carriage no. 11017—doctors, lawyers, philosophers, poets, millers, construction assistants. Except for sociologists; there are none here.

I swore by Apollo the physician, by Asclepius, by Hygieia and Panacea, and by all the gods and goddesses, calling them to witness, that I would keep my life and my art pure and honourable. And to you as well, Dionysus—three times 50 ml of Scotch in my pocket, one already emptied, for it is 10:10 a.m. in the former day, and my head still rings from yesterday’s visitation of yours.

For I have another visit today—to a patient reported by the ever-diligent public order services. I shall be there at 11:11 a.m., if life proceeds as usual. Pairs of numbers. The biological clock is remarkably precise, which makes it easy for paranoia to conjure self-referential visions of a mystical weight, an intentional glimpse into the absolute. 11017. Three ones and a seven.

A suicide—though I cannot recall which one this week, perhaps a euthanasia—delays the train by six minutes. Or perhaps twelve? They say it affects the driver’s mental state. As does the doubling of the day. The day after tomorrow, they were forecasting a tripling.

Soho—sleepless Carnaby Street. I knock on the door, the number withheld under medical confidentiality. The patient: a man of fifty. He suffers from severe obesity. Surgical reduction of the stomach has not helped. He is a superman and despises my Christian mercy. In the name of the Father and of the Son—on the stairwell, the second of the three 50 ml bottles.

I pass the patient’s neighbour; I remember her from my last visit. A Polish woman. In her home, Professor Białynicki-Birula [1] competes for airtime with Izabela Trojanowska [2]. Her husband delayed the Victoria line today by six minutes. “I gave him a spoonful of neutron matter this morning,” she says, exhausted.

I ask—to whom?

“He’s put on an ungodly amount of weight. Good Lord, how can one let oneself go like that? The Antichrist.”

“Administering neutron matter is illegal, madam,” I warn her coolly, but she continues:

“He got it into his head that he would absorb Proxima Centauri first, and then reach for Alpha. A pompous idiot. The Transfiguration of the Lord.”