“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. . . .”
“Then that feeling wells up inside me, the one that has me stalking through the woods at night like an animal, shitting in a hole by the wayside, pissing into a river that rolls and hums, clutching an axe in two white-knuckled fists looking for something old to destroy. . . .”
“Stretched between two shimmering steel bars, the cobweb bends. Concave, then convex, yielding to the dry night breeze. It shifts not as a collective of strings but as one membrane, illuminated from above by the strip of lights under the railing. It was constructed with care by a tender architect, now invisible, presumed deceased. . . .”
“It is not this place that turns against me, but my own mind. I know this, and it only makes the experience more disturbing. So much depends on a red snail crawling along the edge of a straight razor. . . .”