Ali dies first, in 1996, or perhaps it’s 1997. He’s been travelling through Italy and Greece by himself, on a sabbatical from the academic world that he has come to loathe (he’s a professor at York). The pressure to publish work that he finds palimpsestic is becoming excruciating; beneath the words that he prints, he can see the ghosts of the ones he’s struck through and erased. He has no new ideas and finds his colleagues in the humanities facile. They can no longer think for themselves, he believes, and he does not exempt himself from this criticism.

After passing through Greece, he holes up in a pensione near Rome’s Termini station for a month, surviving on pasta and powder and pills. The pensione is run by a former priest who still wears his Roman collar and cuts the electricity in the middle of the night. The priest speaks no English and calls Ali ragazzo and passes no comment on his proclivities, simply crossing himself whenever he takes payment for the room, which is a cold all-in-one with a toilet and sink and bucket in the corner and a bed with sheets so stiff they feel like cardboard. A brass Jesus, weeping, is on the wall near the sink, and Ali finds its gaze disconcerting when he’s washing his balls in the early morning. He covers it up once or twice. The priest uncovers it when he cleans the room and even adds a figurine of the Virgin Mary for good measure. Ali returns the Virgin and assures the priest that he will not cover Jesus up any more; the priest gestures to indicate that the Christ is in Ali’s heart if he uses his head to search for him.