Now understand with the same fervour, the same awareness of your own vulnerable extension as you lie upon the table, spread out like a butterfly from the open edge of your bone casement, that the surgical machine has broken, that all the doors and windows of the operating theatre are open to the grey polluted sky, and inrushing on the gusts of a storm come grit and birdshit, fine particulate matter from dirty engines, viruses and bacteria and fungi and parasites, gross fragments of vegetation and gravel zinging and pinging around the room like shot. And now, as the arachnoid arms of the machine ripple and flourish the slurrying essence of your body’s emergent self, so all the spare attachments and medical instruments are sucked into a vortex by the howling wind, and riding the squall come hungry gulls and burrowing carnivorous ants. The clean, glistening surfaces of you are marinated in grime, pecked and invaded, stolen for the hexagonal incubators of blind larvae, or just digested where they lie—and yet, you live. You live and you continue to think and be aware. You feel the pattern of who you are deliquesce as if you were a caterpillar in a cocoon. They lied to you when you were a child: the grub does not become the angel. It melts and dies and from the foetid stew emerges a new animal. Metamorphosis is not transmigration. It is the retooling of meat.