My father gave me early indications that he would live forever. One.

Where do people need to go so badly they can’t realise what is already here, outside the car window.

He had become simply Edward Bloom: Man. I’d caught him at a bad time in his life. And this was no fault of his own. It was simply that the world no longer held the magic that allowed him to live grandly within it.

You are a good dad,” I say. “Thanks,” he says, and his eyelids flutter a bit, as if he’s heard what he’s come to hear. This is what is meant by last words: they are keys to unlock the afterlife. They’re not last words but passwords, and as soon as they’re spoken you can go. “So.

All of a sudden my arms were full of the most fantastic life, frenetic, impossible to hold on to even if I’d wanted to, and I wanted to. But then all I was holding was the blanket, because my father had jumped into the river. And that’s when I discovered my father hadn’t been dying after all. He was changing, transforming himself into something new and different to carry his life forward.

Because the Empire controls the media, we can turn any news to the Emperor’s advantage.

Then there was a woman, in her mid-fifties about, who in almost every respect was perfectly normal. But this was the way with these people: in so many respects they were normal, there was just that one thing, that one terrible thing.

To get better now would take more than a miracle; it would take a written excuse from Zeus himself, signed in triplicate and sent to every other deity who might lay claim to my father’s withered body and soul.

This wasn’t life, of course. This was life support. This was what the medical world had fashioned to take the place of Purgatory.

To get in cars and drive down roads all over the country, all over the world, to drive just as slowly as the law will allow – although the law, especially as it pertains to speed limits, is not something Edward Bloom respects: twenty in town is too fast for him; the highways are madness. How can the world be seen at such speeds? Where do people need to go so badly they can’t realize what is already here, outside the car window?