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barbed-wire fence, I press my forehead against the metal, dig it into my fat face. Below me is the ocean. I hope I will see some whales. Baleen, humpbacked or sperm, it makes no difference. I am composing music for them, you know. When I finish the music, I will set up speakers, hundreds of them, I will play the music for the whales. They will gather beneath my house, they will nestle comfortably in the sea and smile upwards.
    Claire is beside me. She has put on a terry-cloth robe. We watch the water. It is rough, tempestuous. Men will be lost at sea today, their widows will evermore wear weeds.
    “I don’t like being touched,” Claire tells me. “I was touched a lot, for a long time, and now I don’t like it.”
    “I don’t like touching.”
    “I didn’t mean to scream at you.”
    “Oh, think nothing of it. I’ve been screamed at many times. Fay was a great one for screaming at me.”
    “That your wife?”
    “My used-to-be wife.”
    “Your ex.”
    “Ex, why and zee.”
    “How long were you married?”
    “Many, many years. More than I care to remember. Or am capable of, for all that.”
    “Why’d you bust up?”
    Now, to make matters truly nauseating, we have the daily Memory Matinee. See Desmond come home unexpectedly. See him mount the stairs, eager for the embrace of his life-mate. See him open the bedroom door. See … 
agh
.
    Fay, you know, was born too late. As are we all. Fay should have existed during the French Revolution. She would not have been bored. She could have led small peasant insurrections. She’d cheer dizzily as the heads rolled off the aristocrats, her ample bosom heaving. In that time of mayhem, there would have been wanton copulation.
    “So what have you been up to, dude?” Claire is trying to be cheery, she even taps my flabby arm with a small set of freckled knuckles. “You been working away?”
    “I’ve been working.”
    “On the
Whale Music?”
    “No. No, I’ve neglected the
Whale Music
. I’m going to go work on that now.”
    “Don’t you think you maybe ought to go to bed?”
    “If you have any questions on human behaviour—although I myself am stymied much of the time—feel free to ask.”
    “Huh?”
    I wander into the living room. Wait. My fairy godmother has been here. Look on the table, what do you see? A bottle of whiskey. When brain cells fall out, you leave them under your pillow, and in the morning there will be a bottle of booze there. I unscrew the top, look around cannily (force of habit, I instinctively search for the despicable ex-footballer Farley O’Keefe), and send a shot downwards.
    I blast back into the music room, retro-rocket into the control booth, power-on all my computers and machines. “Desmond to Earth, Desmond to Earth,” I mutter into a squalling microphone. Apparently there is something evil up on the planet Toronto in the Alpha Centauri galaxy. I drink more whiskey. And now, the
Whale Music
. Yes! I must dance to the
Whale Music
. I must leap into the vocal booth and sing along, the “Song of Flight” and of “Danger”. You know what this needs, don’t you? A sax, absolutely, a sax to crackle like dolphins in the never-ending sun, a sax to rip life through the heavy water.
    If Dan-Dan were here, he could play the sax. That was amusical machine that he learnt to work, maybe not particularly well, but Danny could certainly play the dolphins.
    It is not a good idea to reflect on my brother and consume whiskey.
    It seems to me that I recently had some intention of going to bed. What a noble intention that was, wouldn’t Dr. Tockette have been pleased. Now I’m going to sleep, but unfortunately getting to bed is more or less out of the question.
    Oh, dreamtime. Peachy. There’s nothing I like better than these little features. My mind has hired a really shlocky director, some asshole who affects a monocle and talks with a thick Brooklyn accent. He favours gratuitous nudity, graphic violence. Today the boor has decided to redo