Snow in Novvy Urengoy

It's snowing in Novvy Urengoy. Under the cover of darkness a man is coming home, carrying a pot his colleague's wife threw away. There's vodka on his breath, but no-one will mind. He is thinking that he should have washed the sheets.

Imagine yourself there.

Now imagine you're in Algiers. It's hot, but raining. It never rains. I'm there too. I'm shaving, carefully. The door to the bathroom is open wide, and there's still steam escaping out into the bedroom. There's a girl in my bed, asleep. I can see her shoulderblade in the mirror, and I can hear the rain on the tiles outside. I won't leave.

In a while, you'll imagine you're somewhere else. They always do.

I think: somewhere, right now, someone is warming their hands on a fire, and someone else just threw off their doona and leapt from their mattress hopping around like the carpet was full of needles.

I think: I could fall in love with someone who is making love right now to someone else.

And she is thinking: Everything I wanted will come true if I just try hard enough.

I guess there would be about 15 million office blocks in the world. How many of them are absolutely empty right now? In Calafate, there are only seven office blocks. All of them are empty of people, except one, which is full of a woman crying in the stairwell. She is not dressed in a suit. She has a t-shirt on, and it says "la vida es llena con sorpresas". Outside the building, a car chokes cloudy fumes into the cold air. The door is open, and the driver is staring straight at the dashboard, which says 237,664km. He's thinking: I could have driven from here all the way around the world six times.

None of the billions of crabs in the ocean, or any hiding under rocks on the beach, are thinking these things. Nor are any of the babies in baby-containers or wadded in blankets or lying like upside down millipedes.

One baby is naked. He is cold. He can see out the window, and he can see stars. Millions of them. He doesn't know they're stars. I'd like to tell him that stars are holes in a blanket that covers the world, that we can see through to the other side. While he'd still believe me.