When the elements returned at the end of the night from Section 14, and entered the barracks drunk and exhausted, with signs of emptiness on their bodies, I watched them throw themselves one by one onto their beds lined up on the sides of each barracks, as if a machine gun at the end of the corridor opened fire and they fell one after the other. It was only moments before I began to imagine their busy weekly night, and I boarded from their smells, their laughter, and their obscene phrases a scene of the section and the internal rooms. Every time I tried to escape from the machine gun ambush that killed them all – from the novel’s cover