All these years later in London, I found myself once more beset by ghosts from other realms. The perfume of stars was the same rich and mouth-watering anise, though now I worried that it might be evidence of a ministroke rather than of dimensions distant and unreal. As before, I painted what I saw: my hands were not imagining but following a map that only I could see, and I saw it perfectly clearly. I knew by old habit how to break the picture into parts and so produce something that made sense to someone without my fractured consciousness, and so I did, no longer wrestling with what was in my mind to force it on to the canvas, but inviting it and making space for it. Without the urgency and arrogance of youth, I found I was content to accept its strictures, and without the fear of failure I did not seek to moderate what came, so that the business of art was to some extent a placid and exploratory one—as one might explore a tornado in a glider, if one did not fear for the structure of the plane. In that earlier encounter, I had traced the outline of a grim leviathan in a forest of numbers—to the stark disapproval of the viewing public, who wanted more in the vein of frozen worlds and bikini astronauts—and now I revisited that unloved image, setting the scene in a vast underground commuter tunnel. It hung ugly in the air, more threatening, I think, than it would have been in the water. The object of its scrutiny—a fleshy fellow on his drive home—looked suitably appalled. Annie wasn’t sure what the game engine would make of such a thing, but that was the point, she said, to inject the unexpected into the tone, the nightmarish into the visual. Thus encouraged, I threw in more mystical shapes as they came to me: a fish-white assassin in a Warhol suit; a banker in the robes of an ancient priest; Annie herself, much older, captured and interrogated in the ugly society she had imagined for us; and her grandmother, slim and beautiful and ailing, cast as a Roman scholar and made just different enough that I did not think Michael would see it.