So by the time I might have thought myself able to relinquish the role I had played, it was too late to do so. I was another person. We all are, anyway, with every passing instant, even without the many worlds, changing from moment to moment, waking to waking, our continuity found as much within the context of others and our institutions, but how much more so for those of us who jump from soul to soul, world to world, mind to mind, context to context, husk to husk, leaving who knows what behind, picking up who knows what from whom?

I thought my time had come on a few occasions, most recently when I was chasing a disgraced caudillo out of his estancia, down the steps and into the man-high grasses of one of the great blue-green fields that stretched to the horizon. He fumbled the revolver as he plunged, nearly falling, down the broad stone steps, trying both to hold his trousers up as he went and to avoid tripping over the broad red sash that was supposed to secure them. (I’d surprised him both in flagrante and on the toilet, both bucking and straining under a straddling slave girl. I swear people’s sexual predilections never cease to astound me, and you’d have thought by now that I could reasonably claim I’d seen it all: wrong again.)

He’d thrown the girl at me and so bought himself enough time to start running, once he’d tripped over the still twitching bodies of his two guards in the hall outside. I disentangled myself from the screaming girl, then had to punch her with my free, non-cutlass-heaving hand when she came flying at me, nails out (the local gods alone knowing why). Finally I set off in pursuit, roaring for effect. I don’t even know where the pistol came from. I stooped and plucked it from the ground as the caudillo disappeared into the grasses, screaming hysterically. Not loaded. Well done. I pushed it into my waistband anyway and followed the trail of tall broken grasses, slackening my pace a little, then a lot. Ahead of me the caudillo had the hard job, pushing into and trampling over the finger-thick stalks, leaving me with a path that a one-legged blind man could have followed and still gained on his quarry.

The wind sighed across the tops of the grasses somewhere over my head, and for a moment I was back in a banlieue just beyond the Périphérique, vaulting a burned-out car and chasing after the two young Maghrebis who’d thought to try and rape the girl in the tower block we’d just left. All gallant stuff, and she would allegedly turn into either a cowed, failed little thing who’d jump with her baby from the roof of this very block before she was twenty, or a noted authority on psycho-semantics – whatever that was – at the universities of Trier and Cairo, according to whether the mooted violation took place or not.

The boys had a bottle of nitric with them. I was supposed to use it to do to them what they’d been going to do to her after they’d fucked her (otherwise they’d try again), but before I could catch them they leapt a wall and fell ten metres into a newly dug hole for a Métro line extension. One had time to scream before he hit the concrete. The other didn’t – scamp must have been between breaths. Parkour ninjas only in their PlayStation avatar forms, they’d both tumbled as they went and so hit head first. I’d just got to the wall. I still think I heard both necks snap, though it could have been their skulls popping, I suppose. The smashed bottle of nitric pooled around their bodies, raising fumes.

Except this time they both scrambled up a chain-link fence into an electricity substation and started running across the top of the humming machinery, leaping equipment like hurdlers. They disappeared together inside a single titanic blue flash that wrecked my night vision and produced a concussive bang that left my ears ringing. I bounced to a stop against the fence.

Wait, this hadn’t happened… I’d almost jumped the wall too, not been about to go geckoing up some chain-link and start dancing across the busbars.

And then I was back in the blue-green field of giant grass again, still pacing heavily after the increasingly desperate caudillo. I could hear his panting breaths mingled with gasped, gulped pleas for mercy somewhere ahead. The path he was leaving was curved; he might be trying to circle back to the buildings, having worked out that he stood no chance while having to blaze the trail for both of us through the stiff, resistant crop.

But no; I was charging down a hillside favela in Bahia, jumping empty oil cans and screaming at the departing back of another skinny young kid blurring through the crowds of shouting people. This one I just had to scare. I was supposed to be mistaken for an undercover cop and she was supposed to become a famous violinist, not a drug courier. She ran into the first big street at the bottom of the hill and missed getting flattened by a truck by about a centimetre. The truck swerved, half toppled, a man on a motorbike went full speed into the side of it, nearly taking his head off, flopping dead. The girl disappeared down an alley on the far side of the traffic and I stopped, stooped, hands on knees to get my breath back.

I felt dizzy, staggered to one side and then the stagger turned into a run; I was still pelting down the alley after her. I shouted her name and she half turned immediately before she reached the street, long brown hair flung out to the side just for a moment. The truck hit her full on and tossed her into the oncoming stream of traffic, sending her spinning doll-loose under a bus, making it bounce on her body like it had gone over a speed bump. I skidded, stopping so fast against a corner that my sunglasses fell off. What the fuck was going on?

I hesitated as I paced after the caudillo, then kept on going, cutlass raised, shaking my head to loose the bizarrely vivid feeling of having just relived the recent past.

Cutlass they wanted, cutlass they would get. It had some historical meaning, apparently. At any rate, there would be no comeback now, no triumphal return no matter how undeserved. (Ask not. Oh, ask then. The answer is: a corrupt press, the manipulations of a foreign power and rich, influential families bribing thugs and judges: any incompetence, any evil can be washed away with sufficient muscle and money.) But not for our boy here; not for this version in this iteration of the world. The trail was still curving back round through the grass. It was a little narrower now, too, less wasteful. The caudillo must be getting half clever, trying to slip between the stalks rather than batter and stumble his way over them. I upped my pace to a normal walk, still puzzling over what was happening with these not-quite/more-than flashbacks.

I found the caudillo’s scarlet waist-sash first, scribbled like a trail of rather too neat blood on the flattened grass. And then the man himself, lying in the grass, chest heaving, tears streaming, pants still at three-quarter mast, air whistling in and out of his gaping mouth, his hands clasped in front of him as though in prayer while he pleaded with me and offered rapidly increasing sums to let him go.

I swivelled the cutlass in the most economical of backstrokes – the grass constricted matters – and the bastard twisted, rolled and suddenly had a tiny silvery two-shot up-and-over pistol in his quivering hands, pointed right at my face. In that instant, I had time to see that the gun might be small but the barrels each looked wide enough to stick a little finger down and not get it wedged, and the range was laughable.

How slowly my arm seemed to be moving as it brought the cutlass round and down. Had I time to flit away? Not quite. But I could start the process. You never knew.

So, those flashbacks that were not quite and rather more than flashbacks had been some sort of premonition of things going terminally wrong. That was what they’d meant; they’d been a warning. How foolish of me to ignore my own subconscious, I thought, though it did also occur to me that a simple but very strong urge to take off after the caudillo and his girly cries waving a high-powered handgun might have been a still simpler and less ambiguous hint. But a cutlass they had wanted, and where would people like me be if we didn’t even have the weaselly excuse of just obeying orders?