“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. . . .”

“Forty-three years ago in a grungy Wessex studio the magic happened, the sounds were captured. Swift, syncopated horn runs; smoothly wavering flute melodies; long stretches of soft atonality; lyrics to match the grandeur of classical epic. . . .”

“It all happened so fast. There was fire, there was quiet, and then someone tried to tell you you had always been dead. One of his eyes was half closed and he breathed like the wind was trying to steal the air from his chest. They were lies, like everything else he had ever spoken. Yet his skull was so defined under the skin of his face, and his eyes so vacuous they could have been empty sockets. So maybe this was him, Death: not so imposing after all, just another tired old man with a point to make. . . .”

“M’s stretched to the horizon in the haze of daylight like a chain of crumbling mountains. Some were juggling rubber balls in the likeness of decaying planets, while others drummed and blew on instruments to the steady tempo of their advance over the cobblestones. They shined like prophets, and the people cheered. . . .”

“Through the nerve tendons in your brain stream thousands of little blue synapses: a colony of ethereal ants crawling back and forth, tiptoeing on the flowing surface of the ocean like messiahs and miracle working beast-fighters. . . .”

“I held them with the same reverent tension my fingers assume when tracing the lettering across a gravestone: becoming the tragic vessel they lacked, cupping them as if cradling a fishbowl. There was no palette of exotic creatures at play in the glass. Rather, a colorless ghost swimming in its own laughter, coughing out a joke or two that only made sense on the other side. The ashes were ashes, and they need no introduction. . . .”

“Note the way memories move, the transference of her story into my subconscious: the story of her traveling companion, the hurtling locomotive, steaming along beside her through the night for a thousand weary miles before veering from the parallel and away into the dark, blaring its whistle in what could only be a gesture of fond farewell. It is the dream substance of another seeping into my own, taking on a new form, crawling into fresh nooks, growing. . . .”

“To be sure, there was psychological darkness at work in the colony’s design. Nevertheless the inhabitants were meditative people. They practiced an art that was archaic, mystic, yet far from trivial. All of their culture, religion, politics, mythology, and philosophy revolved around this single art—this art revolved around a handful of coins, a hand of playing cards, and a wooden cube. . . .”

“Despite all this rampant pretentious buffoonery, he has been known to crack wise, play a jazzy lick on the saxophone, pursue insane women, and consume large quantities of whisky. His party trick is cornering unsuspecting strangers and drawing out of them latent philosophies and spiritualities, thereby inducing revelations which are often, and for the best, forgotten by the morning. . . .”

“If that beauty is in my eye and not hers as some would have it, so be it: her most secret beauty belongs only to me. I will store it in a box of stained oak, carved with elaborate boyhood mythologies in lines just as dark and deep as those carved in my memory, and each time I open that unholy treasure vault my chest will fill with the scent of warm flesh, sweat sprouting from her arching back, four-leaf clovers, dogs, forests, flowers, and every kind of smoke. . . .”