Perky heroines and square-jawed heroes were still, somehow, getting rich quick. Starlets won lotteries and lottery winners became starlets. Little children, with their heads sealed in virtuality helmets, mimed delighted surprise as they waved their tiny gloved hands at enormous hallucinations. Alex had never been that big a fan of current events anyway, but he had now come to feel that the world's cheerful shiny-toothed bullshitters were the primal source of all true evil.

Alex collided and stuck in a Mexican docudrama about UFOs; they were known as los OVNIS in Spanish, and on 9 de mayo, 2031, a large fraction of the Latin American populace seemed afflicted with spectacular attacks of ozmimania. Long minutes of Alex's life seeped idly away as the screen pumped images at him: monster fireballs by night, puffball-headed dwarfs in jumpsuits of silver lame, and a video prophecy from some interstellar Virgen de Guadalupe with her owll Internet address and a toll-free phone number.

The day nurse tapped at the door and bustled in. The day nurse was named Concepcibn. She was a hefty, nononsense, fortyish individual with a taste for liposuction, face-lifts, and breast augmentation.

"~Ya le hicieron Ia prueba de Ia sattgre?" she said.

Alex turned off the television. "The blood test? Yeah, I had one this morning."

"~Le duele todcwia el ped.~o como anoche?"

"Pretty bad last night," Alex admitted. "Lots better, though, since I started using the mask."

"Un catarro atroz, complicado con una alergia," Concepción sympathized.

"No problem with pain, at least," Alex said. "I'm getting the best of treatment."

Concepciôn sighed and gestured him up. "Todavi~ no acabamos, muchacho, le falta la enema de los pulmones."

"A lung enema?" Alex said, puzzled.

"Today? Right now? ~Ahora?"

She nodded.

"Do I have to?"

Concepciôn looked stern. "jEl doctor Mirabi Ia recetd! Fue muy claro. 'Cuidado con una pulmonia.' El nuevo tipo de pulmonia es peor que eI SIDA, ban muerto ya centenares de personas.