Anton is sat at his computer, of course.
1. A mirror on his desk – Anton occasionally checks his face for something we can’t see. He’s got something embedded in there.
2. Behind him, only lit a little from the glow of the monitor, there’s a bird in a glass dome. One of those sinister taxidermy vignettes, glass eyes, weird long-legged bird stalking through reeds. Wires hold it in place. Cheap, badly done. Old dead bubs are trapped in the glue that circles the base of the dome.
3. Anton is always playing with an elastic donkey. You know the ones: they have a wooden base and when you depress it they collapse. Let go and it springs right back up. Anton’s donkey is shiny dark blue and has a little rat’s skull for a head.
4. There are dead flowers in a vase. Purple/black. Evil emanates from them.
5. Anton has a little box of pills that he occasionally rattles at his ear, checking for numbers. Anton has no ear for music. He sits in silence. What does he say when you start talking about music? “Anything can be re-described, Dave.”
6. Under the desk Anton’s legs wrap around something that is alive. It can’t be seen for the dark. Is it a dog? A cat? Another person? A tentacle?
7. Anton’s keyboard is backlit glass. There are stains where he has spilt richly sedimentary red wine across it. Underneath it there are the glossy flyers for a dozen pole-dancing clubs that line the road outside.
8. Anton is always laughing to himself. If he does cry he goes straight from tears back out into laughter again, pausing from typing only to wipe away an estuary of smudged eyeliner.
9. Anton secretly collects kitsch spray-painted artwork. One window on his desktop is the focus for a online bidding war: he’s trying to get an airbrushed picture of a girl wearing a Stars ‘n’ Stripes bikini, sitting astride a chrome Harley Davidson. That would do, that or a naked, tanned and muscular barbarian woman who is being dominated in battle by a large serpent. These are pleasing items of Art.
10. Anton drinks brandy in green tea. Good for anti-oxidants and for taking away the pain of his bad teeth. It distracts him from fears about the future. Anton is concerned about what happens when brains become digital - incomplete or dangerous mind uploading. What happens if only a rough replica of the mind can be transferred to silicon?
11. Sometimes Anton’s mother yells something up the stairs. They live in the same house, but she hasn’t seen her son for three years. Anton saw her once, when he was hiding in the kitchen.
12. A cosmic ray has, imperceptibly, just punched through Anton’s skull. He doesn’t know it, but the demented thoughts he’s having about the girl from next door are thanks to a series of smashed proteins in his basal centres. They’ve been knocked spinning by the ray. The effect quickly subsides.
13. Anton has a disturbing wart on his arm. He won’t go to the doctor until its too late. One day, one day soon, the wart will control him.