The Bangkok Comfort Zone - that strip running between Patpong, Soi Cowboy and Nana - was a huge bank of ice, thick as a glacier. Only you had to be around years and years to see and feel the deep chill, and by the time you had it was too late, the glacier had already dragged you under. Then you could never escape the gravity of the place that pulled them back from all over the world. Comfort Zone ice like a narcotic made you feel invincible. Zone veterans lived inside a solid block of ice. Zone workers, who were teenagers in chronological years, were soon aged inside the ice. The night ice crystals formed a thick fog over the Zone veterans and workers, creating an ice bridge; these ice people knew they could no longer live outside the Comfort Zone. They looked as normal as anyone else on the street because no one can see the ice, it's carried inside, around the heart. Calvino had gone through the event horizon of the Comfort Zone, and lived in the Zone's ice age for so long that it had become a habit. Addiction, baby. He had become Zone dead like the others