Trying to reach out from the place where he was headed, where he had lived most of his life, the strange city of dream-makers, of poverty and test screenings and murder and money - to other places, other nights, other hunting grounds. To other cities, other machines, forests of buildings and rivers of concrete where other men and women missed the stars at night and tended small plants on window sills and kept tiny dogs to take for walks along corridors in the endless procession of boxes and intersections and lights; where they rented space in other people's property so they had somewhere to sleep so they could get up and perform profit-related tasks they neither understood nor cared about, simply so they would be given the tokens of exchange they needed in order to rent the space in which they slept and snarled and watched television until finally some of them slipped out of their windows and ran howling down the dark streets, throwing off a numbness handed down from a society that was itself trapped in fracture and betrayal and despair; the lonely insane in a culture turning into a Christmas bauble, gaudy beauty wrapped around an emptiness which was coalescing faster and faster into parking lots and malls and waiting areas and virtual chatrooms - non-places where nobody knew anything about anybody any more.

Abruptly the whirling stopped.

Und ich merke jetzt erst beim abschreiben, daß der ganze Absatz aus nur drei Sätzen besteht ...