"The instant that Ma Daode, director of the newly created China Dream Bureau, wakes from his snooze, he discovers that the adolescent self he has just dreamed about has not disappeared but is standing right in front of him. It is an afternoon in late spring, and he has been dozing in his swivel chair, his shoulders hunched over and his pot belly compressed into large rolls of fat."
When I am young and don’t know much about the way lives curl and coil around each other and that we call this love, I ask my brother why he does not want the lips of girls. We are playing in the sandbox, that liminal space where other worlds are encouraged to open. He looks at me and I cannot break the stare. Our castles in the wet sand fall apart.
"Nicole bought the switchblade when she went down to Tijuana with her mom and dad. They’d let her go off by herself as long as she was back when she’d promised. She pretended to go shopping for dresses but instead went to the nightclubs, where Mexican girls not much older than us blew whistles loud in her face, dumping cheap tequila down her throat. She pretended to swim but instead bought things you couldn’t here, pills that made us sleepy but not high, and, of course, that switchblade. It looked exactly like a joke switchblade I’d had as a kid, one that was actually a comb. Same black and silver handle, same plastic switch, just as flimsy and cheap looking. But the blade was heavy, pale and cold like the moon."
Long ago in my reading, I came across a term, a single word, used to describe the phenomenal blending of voices that can occur when close blood relatives sing together.
The power went out late last night, at ten past midnight. While people were still sleeping, the electrical appliances stopped working. The children who woke were cranky; they missed the hum of the refrigerator and the whir of the fan, sounds as comforting to them as a lullaby.
"We started to plan our escape. Exactly what prompted our decision, I wasn’t sure, only we didn’t like that the old black and blues on our bodies didn’t fade completely before new ones were pressed on top of them. We started to fear that if we stayed, our skin would eventually turn a dark purple, an ill-fitting shade for us both. Boyfriends would be nearly impossible then. The beatings, different in the way they were administered and in the reasons why, looked the same on our skin."
My sister Biira is not; she’s my cousin. Ehuu! Ever heard of King Midas’s barber, who saw the king’s donkey ears and carried the secret until it became too much to bear? I could not hold it in any longer.
"Borges writes that mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both cause the population to multiply. That assertion probably shows a comprehensive goodwill toward nature, because humankind as a creature, at least as seen from above, seems by and large destructive, craven, and detestable. In this it most resembles, at least according to the author Roberto Bolaño, a rat. But contrary to Borges’s view, mirrors were, for Marco Devoti and I, the summer he and Max Lamas visited us, more than a way to multiply ourselves—which we thought formidable in and of itself—but also a way to multiply the pleasure of what we eventually undertook in my little bedroom."
"That Renault station wagon you see over there, it’s from our neighborhood—and so are all the guys inside it. They’re Halime Teyze’s boys. The one at the steering wheel is Yusuf, he’s the oldest. Three of the others are his brothers, and next to them is cousin Muhittin, and that little squirt in the back is Muhittin’s son, Süleyman. They do fancy plastering on ceilings, that’s what all the stuff in the back is for. They make a fine team and work like demons—but the work’s never steady."
"On the way from Stockholm to Arvidsjaur, her plane touched down in Lycksele to drop off some of the passengers and pick up others. The flights cost five thousand kronor, as much as a ticket to New York. On top of that, she’d bought a pair of warm winter boots, a jacket and a blouse for another few thousand. Their first lovers’ weekend cost her dearly, but what did money matter when you were buying bliss?"
"I am the most hated person on our local internet. Most people must have seen my mug by now. Crossed out or smeared with blood, my face is spreading on social media at a pace of ten thousand hates an hour. Not even the most hopeless football game or bruising defeat at hockey can stir up so much hatred. Not even our president and the prime minister. The winner of the Eurovision song contest who sang about some sad elephant in a jolly zoo is Miss Popularity compared to me. Opposition politicians and cabinet members are secretly grateful to me—at last people have channelled their hatred elsewhere."
"Fear of homosexuals is never far from the surface. The few people who have supported me after my conviction must be very strong-minded. I do not think most people are equipped to associate with pariahs. They have a shadowy sense of how frail they themselves would be in the face of institutional opposition and stigmatization, how utterly cast down if they lost their jobs, if people they knew stopped serving them in shops or looked past them in the street. It is not hatred that turns the majority against the minority, but intuitive shame."
"Karen had died on the trip down from Ohio. The heart: something they had known about for a while. She’d even sing jokily about it during rare drunken moments: 'Oh, I’ve got a hole in my heart, / and that’s a mighty bad place to start!'"
"To me, it all smelled new. The boxes we’d moved our stuff in were still piled in the corners of the apartment, and the smell of fresh paint drifted like a cheerful tune through the rooms. Everything was clean. Most of the wardrobes and cupboards had already been assembled; odd screws and tools still lay around—an electric drill, a hammer, screwdrivers, extension leads, a scattering of wall plugs. In the kitchen, the pots, pans, and cutlery had already been stowed. We had even polished them before putting them away, and the rings on the stove were gleaming too."
"Though I brushed my teeth a number of times, I couldn’t lose the taste of brass. I’m almost certain that this was down to the cider I’d drunk the night before. All morning, I was reminded of ‘amber mole.’"
"He wanted to stand on a balcony and look out onto a grand boulevard. It was to be as massive as the one in Beijing or, even better, the one in Paris—a Romanian Champs-Élysées to replace the old boyars’ houses with their rotten roofs and unkempt gardens, wiping away the winding old alleyways where epidemics could break out at any moment."
"Urmila rearranged the animals. They were homely, unwelcoming; no one was buying. Should she group them by type: elephants next to rhinos next to giraffes?"
"At first I went on as normal. If someone misguidedly said, “Hey, there, Sydney,” I’d laugh. Later, when I couldn’t purge the name from my being, I’d gag “Syd ney,” the two syllables dead saliva, utterly meaningless, a joke."
"There was one other Arab onboard the ship to Marseille. His name was Faruq al-Azmeh, and the day after leaving port in Alexandria he approached Midhat at breakfast, with a plate of toast in one hand and a string of amber prayer beads in the other. He sat, tugged at the cuffs of his shirt, and started to describe without any introduction how he was returning from Damascus to resume his teaching post in the language department of the Sorbonne. He had left Paris at the outbreak of war but after the Miracle of the Marne was determined to return. He had grey eyes and a slightly rectangular head."
"I first encountered Dreux on an afternoon in autumn; the deer, precisely five years later. In Dreux’s case, I left the house one day under blue skies only to be caught in a sudden downpour. The narrow, winding streets of Belgrano were soon in full spate. Women clustered together on the sidewalks trying to establish the best places to cross; an old lady assailed the side of a bus with her umbrella when the driver refused to open the doors; and before long the shop owners, watching the deluge through their window displays, brought out the metal barriers they had armed themselves with after the previous flood."
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