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“Jason wrenched open the barn door and saw light emanating from Ralphy’s desk on the far side of dark space. But for the slivers of sun between old boards, it was the only medium for vision. He waded through ankle-deep wood fragments toward the glowing aura, where a huge silhouette sat, too big for its chair, nodding and heaving, bent over its own hands, muttering a curse word now and then, pausing, resuming, sawdust orbiting its head in a halo, caught in the gravity well. . . .”

“Outside there were fifty or so self-loving young people, who were kissing and hugging and swilling down alcohol and sucking down cigarettes and swearing for no real reason. Everyone’s bodies were in the same place, but their minds were somewhere else. There was a lot of stupidity and solipsism and senselessness to be found. It made me feel a little dirty for reasons I couldn’t explain to myself. . . .”

“The pictures on the wall are redundant, because the people I love are all here, tangled upon my bed eating my dark chocolate and reading poetry upon my rug and spilling red wine across my vanity. And as our light filters out into the graveyard, I am overcome with a crippling stab of preemptive nostalgia for this night which embeds itself inside me like a wound before it is even finished. . . .”

“My throat is swollen shut, and I can’t really talk like I used to, and I’ve been spending most of my days wrapped up in a housecoat, coughing like an old, old man, here and there around the house. My forehead is practically volcanic. My sweat is glacial cold. . . .”

“I finish my carton of sake and toss it in a trash can in a small park. I stand on top of a picnic table. I can see the Shinjuku skyline in the distance. Little red lights on the tops of the buildings bloom and die, bloom and die—forever and ever. A cold wind blows. . . .”

“Because I was not really in love with the woman with whom I shared my brother’s basement. Because I didn’t really mind living in my brother’s basement. Because I stared out at those ocean fields and pot lid sky and found no blueprint for any damn thing. Because I spent most mornings on the edge of hungover dreams, dozing off in the penumbras of your daily routine. Preemptively squashing the multitude of crawlers in the chaff, before they had an inkling to bite. . . .”

“It’s a temptation—when I see that defenseless desire for the unexplainable in his eye—to spout out some profound obscurity that’ll have him totally sideways for a week. But I can’t do it. So I say, West. Or I say, North. Or I say, South-East. And he nods like it makes perfect sense, as if whatever direction I choose at random is the will of God no less than the direction of the wind, and he believes to the core those wolves will go to where they must and surely must go. . . .”

“And then it was down the hatch, so to speak, and a wave of heat would rush over my face, and I would realize right then, for just that moment and none others, that maybe I really was dreaming, and maybe I was dead—and if this was death, I was OK with it, and would never fight back. The song would stop, and someone would shout out the name of another one, and the lights would go out, and there we were in the dark of the room, in the dark of our minds, lit up by a laptop monitor and a string of Christmas lights, whose glow permeated this room and that one by way of a doorless frame. . . .”

“The atmosphere is the same inside as out. Soupy air that makes your clothes stick to your skin like tissue paper over a shaving wound. Heat and ever-present strangeness. And dust, every smell comes out of the dust. No one tracked it in here after the airport was built, it was always here. There was dust where the contours of the building would be one day, the dust told them where to build, it was already raining from the ceiling materials before they formed a ceiling. . . .”

“. . . she spit out / pretty, bitter jolts / of eighteen years of wanting / or eighteen years of bleeding. . . .”