There, this third spoonful contains a number in between the first two spoonfuls; a straddle, a sure sign that we are zeroing in on the right number. I decide to take no more nonsense from myself and just eat this spoonful. This works and I am able to sit back again. I sigh through my nose as my teeth and tongue quickly convert the mass of peas into a single lump of paste inside my mouth. I swallow and sit forward, scooping up the next mouthful of piselli picolli. On the table the candle flame flickers, as though shivering.

I stop and let the spoon fall back into the plate. I stare at the candle, remembering.

And then, suddenly, I was not merely remembering. I was-

I watched her move her hand above the lit candle, through the yellow flame, fingers spread fluttering through the incandescing gas, her unharmed flesh ruffling the very burning of it. The flame bent this way and that, guttered, sent curls of sooty smoke towards the dim ceiling of the room where we sat as she moved her hand slowly back and forth through the gauzy teardrop of flame.

She said, “No, I see consciousness as a matter of focus. It’s like a magnifying glass concentrating rays of light on a point on a surface until it bursts into flame. The flame is consciousness; it is the focusing of reality that creates that self-awareness.” She looked up at me. “Do you see?”

I stared at her.

I was here, here with her, in this place, right now.

This was not a memory, not a flashback. Certainly we had taken drugs and we were still at this point under their influence, but this was definitely not some addled consequence of their effects. This was startlingly immediate and unquestionably vivid. Real, in a word.

She put her head to one side a little, flexed an eyebrow. “Tem?” she said softly. “Are you listening?”

“I’m listening,” I said.

“You look distracted,” she told me. She pulled the sheet that was all she wore a little tighter about her, as though she was cold. She took a breath, went to speak.

I said, “There is no intelligence without context.”

Her brows flicked momentarily into a tremulous frown.

“That’s what-” Still frowning, she sat back, removing her hand from the candle flame; it curled out after her fingers in a long flexing trail of glowing yellow, as though reluctant to let go of her. “Have I said this to you before?” she asked.

“Not really,” I said, watching the candle flame restore itself. “Not as… No.”

She looked at me with what could have been either suspicion or bafflement. “Hmm,” she said. “Well, it’s like a magnifying glass, and the partial shadow it casts around its focus. The halo of reduced light around the bright spot at its centre is the debt required to produce that central concentration. In the same way, meaning is sucked out of our surroundings and concentrated in ourselves, in and by our minds.”

(Her hair-)

Her hair, a brown-red spill of curls across her shoulders and along her slender neck, formed a quiet nimbus around her canted head. Her deep orange-brown eyes looked almost black, reflecting the poised stillness of the candle’s flame like some image of the consciousness she had been talking about. They looked perfectly still and steady. I could see the minuscule spark of the flame reflected in them, unwavering, constant, alive. She blinked slowly, languorously.

I recalled recalling that the eyes only see by moving: we can fasten our gaze on something and stare intently at it only because our eyes are constantly consumed with dozens of tiny involuntary movements each second. Hold something perfectly and genuinely still in our field of vision and that very fixity makes it disappear.

“I love you,” I said.

She sat forward suddenly. “What?”

The word, so emphatically pronounced, was enough to blow out the candle’s little flame and plunge the room into darkness.

The candle sitting on the table in front of me, here in the kitchen of the Palazzo Chirezzia, blows out, caught in a sudden draught I can feel on my face, bringing a chill that lifts the hairs on the back of my neck. The spoonful of cold peas I was about to eat remains poised halfway to my mouth, exactly where it was the instant before I relived, replayed and changed those moments from a room a dozen years and an infinitude of worlds away. But I thought the spoon fell-

A door thuds somewhere in the building. Here in the kitchen, things click and buzz and motors start turning, fridge and freezer compressors sighing into life as a light comes on in the hallway outside and I hear distant footsteps.

Last night I left this bed and this room and this level and I took me down to the floor below, the ground floor, where I witnessed something I found most terrible just yesterday. I found the silent ward. I was there, I was in it, I lay there with them for a time. It did not last long but it was long enough. I found it terrifying.

It happened after I fainted in the office of the broad-shouldered lady doctor. I still don’t know quite what happened there. It ended up as some sort of bizarre hallucinatory experience, a lucid nightmare of voodoo cause and effect that ended with a keeling-over that I was frankly thankful for at the time and, despite the fact it meant it makes it harder to work out what did happen, that I am still thankful for.

Usually, I’ve found, there is a distinct point when one realises that one is asleep and dreaming. I can’t remember one in what happened – what seemed to happen – yesterday. Was it all a dream? It can’t have been. At the very least, I went or was taken somewhere else yesterday, out of my room.

I was brought back here on a trolley after my time in the silent ward (we’re coming to that). I am certain I was as awake at that point as I am now. Though, when I think about it, I felt just as awake at the start of the experience with the broad lady doctor as I do now. Well, we must leave that aside. There is a continuum of banal experience between waking up in the silent ward and now. No manipulated dolls causing people to have breathing difficulties or heart attacks or whatever and then to throw themselves out of windows. I imagined all that anyway, so I’m told.

This needs thinking about, obviously. That is why I am thinking about it. I am lying here, eyes closed, concentrating. I may have to get up and carry out further investigations in the day room amongst the droolers and perhaps ask further questions of the nursing staff, but for now I need to lie and rest and think without distractions.

Having said that, I am very aware that the door to my room is closed and I will open my eyes the instant I hear it open, just in case my assaulter from the other night has the audacity to attempt a repeat visit during daylight hours.

Two things. First, I cannot see where the visit to the broad lady doctor went from rational to absurd. It appears seamless in my memory. This is most vexing. Like not being able to see how a simple trick is performed in a magic show, or the join in a piece of mending where it ought to be obvious.

The second thing is what happened after I regained consciousness.

I woke flat out in a gurney, a trolley bed. It was dark; only a couple of soft glows from night-lights illuminated a large space the size of the day room at the end of my own corridor, maybe bigger. The ceiling looked higher than in my room or the day room. I felt groggy and sleepy but in no pain, unharmed. I tried to shift a little, but either the sheets were very tight or I had temporarily lost a lot of strength – I was too groggy to tell which – and I had to remain lying flat out. Listening carefully, I could hear gentle snores.

I turned my head to one side, then the other. I was at one end of a large open ward, the kind of thing you see in old photographs, or poor countries. My trolley was at the end of a line of beds, lying conveniently near the set of half-glazed double doors. On the other side of the room, beneath tall windows, was another line of beds. To see more, I tried again to raise my upper torso, attempting to bring my arms up so that I could support myself on my elbows, but without success.