Like anyone stuck beneath the ogdoad, the first thing I saw on dying was the butcher, John ‘the Sugar Cane’ Damascene. Four times out of five, and this was one of them, I manage to get away from him and out of the slaughterhouse. The trick is to jerk your body violently – in any direction, it doesn’t matter – as soon as you awake, which upsets the shackles before they harden, and allows you to roll off of what I’ll call the conveyor belt. The sensation is akin to escaping sleep paralysis under the threat of suffocation, but the effort needed is about tenfold, and there’s only enough time to do it if you give up the ghost with the right presence of mind. Then it’s onto the floor that’s covered in sewage and bodily fluids, and out the door to Luna. “Not you again,” the butcher said as I scrambled past his ankles (that was classic John) – it wasn’t worth the trouble to chase me anymore, and he had work to do.
	I was in a businesslike mood, having spent my last round faffing about the afterlife with a psychopomp aliased Hosteen Coyote (I suppose he thought that was clever) that had promised to smuggle me past the archons and salvage my friend Helena. As far as I knew, she was still stuck in Mars, having died with the resurrection on her but without the fortitude to proceed. ‘The middle’ where she rotted was either a torture house, or the waiting room named by track 2 of side 3 of Genesis’ The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, an album clearly written by someone who had been to that place and retained some confused memory of it. In any case, I resolved not to spend this run looking for her, or dabbling in shortcuts: no more fantasies of easy escape or altruism, just good hard work and one more ingenuous attempt.
	Luna the first ring is Iao’s sphere, and being just over the welkin, it’s crowded with abstractions dreamt up by bad physicists, and embodiments of trauma that float up from the sublunary realm when someone is burned, born, &c. These latter are bits of flame that hang about lanterns and lampposts and, much like infants, just scream and scream in agony all day. There are also some genuine human souls that, like me, tend to bide their time or procrastinate in its alleyways. Our position is understandable: there’s no rush to go back and be horse-whipped or starved ‘down there,’ only to face John all over again. This makes appealing the prospect of simply waiting, and drinking and fornicating (there’s no procreative sex up here), until finally the architects of the body catch you in their flashlights and seal you up in a new vessel.
	And so despite my ambitions, the first thing on my mind was relief at my break from the world, and the will to enjoy it. I jogged over the cobbles under a sky that looked like Rainbow Ice Dippin’ Dots, or one of those psychologist’s tests for color-blindness (in fact like all humans and archons I am colorblind here, but nevertheless happen to know that the sky has the words of Ephesians 6:12 written across it). Once in every while, this new firmament groaned like a child, and the blotches of color dispersed in darting patterns, like a startled school of guppies, to reveal a black hole that shat a torrent of rain. The water smelled of waste, and smashed in sheets off the city’s deeply slanted shale rooftops. There were no awnings to shelter under, so I was soaked immediately, and danced around and leapt over the currents roaring through the gutters as I looked for an open door.
	I found one without trouble – an appalling rococo thing with more frills than frame, silver and gold and more silver and gold, with the white paint peeling off in the moisture. All this was in keeping with Iao’s kitchen-sink ‘imagination’ and violence against taste: look how these buildings were crimped one against the other, as if they kept being pushed into a drawer to make more room, with no regard to style or era. Luna’s traffic up and down made it a junk heap, and though the rains made everything smell foul, without them the streets would be lined with gum wrappers and America Online floppy disks.