That the rich have a propensity to infiltrate the minds of the less well-off is a fact I was well aware of, though the extent to which I had become a part of this subterfuge came as something of a shock. I turned to the consumption of water as a way of alleviating the pain of my father's death. I was wearing his clothes now, the whole panoply of sartorial paternity in which he ministered to the dead. From humble origins, he was a pastor of sorts, whose roughhewn ministrations attracted more often than not society's outcasts. I say of sorts for his was a bedevilled vocation. The God before whom he knelt chose to crush him under a torrent of doubt, the residue of which took up residence in my father's soul in the form of an unquenchable rage. This appetite was passed on to me by my father, who in a frenzy of spiritual unrest threw himself off the end of a pier and was drowned. It was after his funeral that I had my first fateful flirtation in the form of a clarified aqueous suspension. As I touched the spoon's silver underbelly to the rim of the bowl I thought of my mother. It was she who led my father to salvation, then fled the coop after I was born.

As a child I believed the future to be made up of a series of heavenly delights that could form the basis of an extended period of happiness. My vanity forbade him-I was lean of mind and my thoughts ran formally in the strangest of directions-from consuming water during the hours of daylight, reasoning that by cloaking my inclination in a nocturnal shroud I might contain its advance. It was around this time my body, which had been verging on emaciated, entered the realms of desiccation. It was this bodily withering that caused me one night, after consuming a larger than normal body of water, to dream of a liquid of such boisterous effervescence that it would enable the consumer of it to pursue unhindered an agenda of equality and social justice coupled with an appreciation of the finer things in life. The powers that be would have us believe that water is a neutral by-product of the waking life, fashioned from ocean and cloud, hydrogen and oxygen, and not the mercurial nocturnal creature I knew it to be. They would demote water to a martyrdom of precipitation, ingestion and micturition. An artefact of such tenacity and durability, which could withstand many months of isolation and interrogation, and still retain its enduring transparency, that was capable of transcending the gulf between rich and poor, between the vaporous opacities of affluence and the glacial angularities of poverty and depravation, was not a mere quotidian derivative but was in embryo the very essence of pre-emption. The metaphors in which water endures are themselves but tangled bridges across vast tracts of injustice, spanning in equal measure the lassitude of slavery and the callousness of mastery, upon whose rotting boughs we eke out our existences in a wilderness of bereavement and grief. Indeed, I have come across water of such poor quality and craftsmanship, so porous in its manifest liquidity as to make a sieve blush, and to think that from such raw material nothing more tentative is fashioned than a form of self-inflicted abolition, a fashionably slipshod by-product of what in the water-making process is called the ulterior posterior. Produced in such abundance, this milky runoff is a composite amalgam resembling the thinner soups guzzled in ever-larger quantities by the lower orders in the mistaken belief that if consumed in large enough doses it will bestow upon their offspring a set of teeth both durable and socially advantageous, sparkling in their luminosity and brightness. The illusory feelings of prowess resulting from such indulgence is of course encouraged by a lax authority given to dumping large quantities of this material onto our unsuspecting city streets. But the primary affront is the hidden abstraction, strewn across the floors of steam rooms and exclusive high-end bathing facilities, where it enters the body through the soles of the feet. This tensile film is harvested from the runoff prior to dumping and consumed in the form of a nutritious skim referred to, disingenuously, as high water. High water is ranked among the more febrile waters, most of which go by the name top water, and in some quarters, topper. The bloom of the wealthy in the winter months can be put down solely to the habitual consumption of top water or topper.

I remained in my employ as inspector of waters for as long as I could. The factory to which I was affiliated specialised in a low-grade derivative of top water called pop water. There were two main ways pop water could be deployed: as a purifying douse called soft water, and in a reinforced semi-solid state known as tiptop. Tiptop should not be confused with top water, for they are very different beasts, designed to keep rich and poor at one another's throats, the abject humiliation of the latter fodder for the former's brutish fantasies and follies. Through my propensity to sample each of these waters whenever the opportunity arose, which was frequently, an inspector's life being a hemlock of boredom and opportunity, I became intimately acquainted with a substance that various clientele were prepared to procure by a certain back door, a derivative of reinforced pop water to which was added an ancillary amalgam of various grades of topper. I soon became addicted to this icy delight; the emotional refinement produced by the flakes of topper pop melting upon my tongue was the closest thing to ambrosia I had ever tasted. So ingrained became my affliction that I required a morning dose simply to function, and was soon calling into the factory on my days off for fistfuls of the snowy Pandora.

As luck would have it, the onset of a mysterious respiratory illness caused me to consider the possibility that I might begin a small manufacturing operation of my own. My breathing took on what is called the breathing of the many, wherein the lungs give out a fractured payload and the sufferer emits a disjointed vocal echo. Many times it seemed as if I was possessed. I would lie awake listening to my fragmented outpourings with a mixture of wonder and dismay. I took a temporary leave of absence from my post and, through being briefly bedridden, became acquainted with one of our industry's more treacherous speculations, the infamous groundwater hypothesis, the solution to which was comprised of a fabled synthesis of waters that would, it was said, send shockwaves through the echelons from which there could be no return. Tyrants and despots the world over feared this fabled concentration. Should it ever be produced in large enough quantities to be distributed internationally, there would be upheaval such as the world has never seen before. This fortuitous event was to become the cornerstone of my work and would lead eventually to the global deployment of looter, radically loose water which combined pop water's addictive sensibilities with topper's aristocratic sophistication. I resigned my post as inspector of waters and began working on the new concoction. Lacklustre and humdrum in appearance, my beguiling fabrication would in the course of my research see me traverse the globe many times over, reaching into the poorest of backwaters, into humanity's forgotten recesses, determined to plant in the hearts of the retches I found there the healing powers of looter. When my breathing became shallow and fitful, I was forced to delegate to a handful of assistances, chief among them my good friend and colleague, Doctor David De Quincey. With a heavy heart, I took up a position in our central production unit, overseeing various aspects of distribution and quality control.

Amid the clamour of implementation, De Quincey's despatches from the front line comingled with the unrelenting advancement of my affliction, the underlying causes of which seemed connected in some way to my father's watery demise. With my respiratory condition worsening my reason was all but overpowered, to such an extent that I could barely distinguish De Quincey's feverish outpourings from the demented echoes that plagued my waking life and haunted my every dream. For a while, as I lingered in the anteroom of my illness, looter's fate seemed but another symptom of my sickly breath, a tainted exhalation, its emancipatory powers shackled to a pair of wheezing lungs. Alas, as I waited at death's door, I was forced to acknowledge the failure of my mission. Bedridden and preyed upon by impotence, my father's aqueous abasement returned to rain on an already saturated parade. De Quincey's remonstrative inundations chimed demonically with what had first caused my heart to sicken, and now sent me through the trauma of my mother's departure to the black water of my father's fateful demise.

I returned to topper pop with a vengeance. I consumed it incessantly, caring little for the fact that this might exacerbate my already deteriorating condition. In my desperation, I pursued it relentlessly, devouring it in broad daylight, to the limits of my endurance. As the illness took its course, I descended further into a cacophonous dementia of empty cravings and hollow satisfactions. My good friend and colleague, Doctor De Quincey, would whisper in my ear that looter has turned against its master, that the reckoning was at hand, my redemptive sustenance had become a conduit of slavery, singling out those it would save so they might better be inoculated against a growing tide of unease, turning them into what I myself had become, a scavenger of the shallows, feasting on the fractious highs of an unalloyed detritus. De Quincey's voice ground me into the dust as the clouds closed around me and the ghosts of what might have been circled high above. They looked down on me and peppered my face with boils and blisters. The world was boiling itself dry and my soul evaporating. I had become my own looter, feeding myself into the furnace of a sinking salvation, until I had reduced myself to a dehydrated gasp. The sweet bird of brotherhood soaring high, the shoots of sisterly love bursting forth in all their verdant glory, had turned the shadows in which I was imprisoned into the fulcrum of an insatiable craving. 

De Quincey was free to roam and it was this very freedom that tormented me. I tried and failed to rein him in, to shield myself from his wild assertions. His voice had a demotic liquidity, like the incessant babbling of a brook, an unstoppable forward momentum that crashed about my ears, stabbing my heart with such a torrent of violent strokes it felt as if my flesh was being flayed, my skin splitting open. Such was my despair I contemplated, as my father had done, taking my own life. Looter was finished. All hope of bridging the chasm between rich and poor had been extinguished. On either side of a barren bed, walls of water were rising. Oblivious to this fact, De Quincey continued to inundate me with facts and figures, extrapolating reciprocated subterfuges, incentivised seditions, revolts against the divide, his thoughts transmitted to me from the frontier in what seemed like an instant. Each morning while breakfasting I listened as he summarised the situation. Mobs were descending upon our warehouses in search of fresh draughts. Due to looter's indiscriminate proficiency, Asia was in the grips of political unrest. Central Europe was awash, with little hope of looter's impact rising above the morass of intangible consummations. After a promising start, looter had failed to take hold in Russia, where the more virulent waters held sway. In the Americas it was on the wane; after a brief period in the ascent its appeal had withered, with both north and south retreating to the comforts of their respective reservations.

I rallied against the pessimistic picture De Quincey painted. I pulled myself together and dispatched a note, ordering his immediate return, the reason for which I withheld least he attempt to override my stipulation. The following morning I received a message from De Quincey saying he was in transit to North America and would presently be stopping off to deliver in person some good news regarding looter's fortunes. He had some business to conclude before his departure and would be with me within a week or two.

Upon hearing the news, my heart soared, so much so that a few days later I felt well enough to venture out. I strolled the grounds and called in upon the workshops, sampling some of the embryonic waters that they were working on. By evening, I felt well enough to have a little game pie for supper, and a couple of glasses of wine, which eased me into a deep and restful sleep.

It was after receiving the news of his arrival that De Quincey's voice, remnants of which still lingered in the auditory shadows, took on a curious characteristic. While not shocking in itself, the inclusion of profanities came as a surprise, as I had become accustomed to the measured, modulated tones into which the knife-thrusts of his initial dispatches had settled. The trappings of his aristocratic upbringing, the cushioned lilts and courteous inflections, had transmuted into a coarsened rasp in which were delivered descriptions of despicable acts, vile torments, cruelties beyond belief. So tangible were these amendments to De Quincey's summations that the very air around me seemed saturated with putrefaction, a rancid odour that lingered long after a summary was completed. And it was this saturation that stirred within me animosities I thought long since departed, feelings of resentment, which rose out of waterlogged depths, in unity with the graceless, ungainly content of De Quincey's dispassionate dispatches.

De Quincey's arrival was a sombre affair. Unable to hide his shock at my condition, he ushered me inside and insisted that I rest before we began our deliberations. As he spoke, I noticed that the odour, which had previously caused me such distress, now emanated from his person. Not just from his breath but from his whole body, as heat and light emanate from something which has caught fire. When he ventured closer, I felt myself engulfed by a wall of flames, my stomach churning as the stench swelled and swirled about me, causing me to raise my handkerchief to my nose and mouth. Was there anything the matter, De Quincey asked, to which I replied that the room was in need of ventilation. I'll open a window, he said. He came closer, sending another nauseous wave coursing through my veins. It was then I noticed that his voice had taken on the coarsened aspect that had so sickened me.

Having agreed to discuss the matter over dinner, I was surprised to find him a short while later standing in the doorway of my bedroom, with a menacing look on his face. He had discarded his outer clothing and was wearing only a pair of soiled undergarments. His legs were covered, up to his knees, in a black, tarry substance, as if they had been dipped in pitch. I asked him if anything was the matter to which he replied that he had in his possession a vial of what he said was a prototype of a punitive corrective, which he had secretly acquired. He was, he said, becoming increasingly fearful that this corrective would impede looter's progress. I persuaded him that we should discuss the matter over dinner when we would celebrate his return in style. I bid him let me rest as I was feeling the strain of the day. He agreed to my request, but before doing so he kissed me as one might kiss someone whom one was betraying. When he pressed his lips to my cheek, I noticed that they had thickened significantly since our last encounter, and his hair had contracted to a penumbra of tightly-cropped curls. With De Quincey in such close proximity, the odour, which had so disturbed me, levelled to the faint but musty vestige that emanates from stagnant water.

The curious thing was that De Quincey never mentioned the matter again. When he arrived down to dinner, he was immaculately dressed, the anomalies in his appearance had vanished, and his voice was returned to its well-modulated articulacy. We discussed how once looter had been restructured we should open a series of small franchise outlets which would function as recovery centres, initially redeploying various auxiliary waters in the service of redistribution so that there might be justice for all and the wellspring of egalitarian cohesion might blossom and looter pour forth its riches. As he was feeling fatigued, De Quincey retired early for the evening and I bid him goodnight, returning to my place by the fire from where I watched him ascend to his room, his stooped figure folding itself into the shadows. 

After he failed to appear at breakfast the following morning, I went to his room and rapped several times upon the door. I called his name then entered to find the vial, which he had showed me the previous day, lying empty on the floor. De Quincey himself was naked and lying face down on the bed. Save for the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet, his body was covered in its entirety in the same tarry black substance that had festooned his legs when he confronted me in my bedroom. His back was a patchwork of welts, some of which were fresh, the lacerations weeping through his tarry skin. After an array of scourging implements was found amount his belongings, the wounds were determined to have been self-inflicted. It seems he had, after administering the self-inflicted blows, taken an incautious overdose of the punitive corrective and it had overwhelmed his heart.