“My gardener,” Ursula said. “You remember my gardener—Shamgar?” “Yes,” Miri said. “Sort of.” “I think he might be gay.” “Yeah? Why?” Ursula laughed. “I think he might be having some sort of affair with the man who works next door.” “Good for him,” Miri said. She didn’t seem very interested—her mind seemed elsewhere.
"The first time that she had gone on her own, she was fifteen. She would leave on the Thursday night. For two days she made herself meals and woke herself up in the morning and Jade and Elena came over and they pretended to be grown ups and went to bed later than they should have."
"I think about that screwdriver every day. I think about it more than I think about my parents. Most of my dreams involve screwdrivers, or at least the dreams I can remember. Sometimes I walk into a hardware store and just stare at all the screwdrivers displayed on the wall. It’s like looking at pornography, minus that moment of release when whatever you’ve been looking at explosively becomes absurd. There are lots of reasons screwdrivers are different from vaginas, but that’s one nobody ever talks about."
"I find myself thinking a lot about my dear Elisabeth. What else am I to do? Of course, I think a lot about my brother, also, but I know what he is doing, so it isn’t as much fun. As for Elisabeth, I don’t even know what country she’s in; maybe she’s still in Hertfordshire, where it was so nice. Our house there was lovely, even in the damp, and there was almost always a sturdy fire going. Papa walked me to school, you know, and all the buildings were made of the roundest funny stones, and at the end of the day, Lisabeth would walk back with me, and Doris would give us steak and kidney pies, and then we’d go outside and throw sticks for the doggies, and Stephan would flirt with both of us a little, and we’d run up the rocks."
"Night again. I’m still counting the minutes and hours since the moment you died. The doctor said “around dawn,” and I’ve decided that means five o’clock. In three hours it will have been four days. In three hours and three days it will have been a week. I want it to have been a week. I want it to have been six months. I want it to have been one year. I long so desperately for a time, a day, when it isn’t so fresh anymore. A day when I’ve figured out how to keep living, how to keep taking care of Ivan, when life feels normal rather than like a sad, sick joke."
"The glare of the fluorescent light made the lizard’s body appear dark, and yet Tetsuyuki was able to tell that it was unmistakably a lizard, not a gecko or a newt. The small striped reptilian pattern was the same as he had seen in the crevices of stone walls, clumps of grass, and on ridges between rice fields when he was a child."
"Every waking moment, I’m astonished that I have any consciousness. I feel like a stenographer of the afterlife—what am I to call myself now, a revenant? An apparition? An entity? I need to find a word in any language that might work. I have no useful spiritual predisposition or references. Here’s how I often feel I would appear, if I appeared: like that famous hollowed-out-looking man on the bridge in Edvard Munch’s The Scream. This image keeps recurring to me."
"We’re heading to the castle, the Hudson river passing by smooth as glass. The guy in front of us is playing a machine-gun video game with the sound loud because he thinks his headphones are plugged in. Doesn’t matter, all I can concentrate on is my leg touching Alice’s leg. It could be seconds or minutes, who knows, where I’m moving my thigh back-and-forth, not connecting with her, then connecting with her."
"The waiters say she got on the train in Chicago, after transferring from Dearborn Station. She was plump and matronly and her glasses were tinted so that she might have been a tourist seeking protection from the sun; but there was neither sun nor fresh air on the train and she was very pale and a little wrinkled, the way clerks or indoor people grow after many years of their protected, colorless kind of life. She was, indeed, that nondescript type of person one might be aware of but never really see in a supermarket or at a bargain basement sale, carefully and methodically fingering each item; or on a busy street corner waiting for the light to change while others, with less conscious respect for the letter of the law, flowed around her. She rode for a whole day before coming into the dining car for a meal: then she had the $1.95 Special. She asked for buttermilk and wanted “lightbread” instead of rolls. The black waiters all grinned at each other in their secret way."
"One sunny day at the start of a ceasefire, a father drove with his son down towards where the fighting had been. A cadaver had been lying on the ground for days, mutilated. The son, who was named Pavlov, and his father, an undertaker, loaded the remains into plastic bags and carried them to the hearse. The cadaver’s belly had been opened by a bullet wound and vermin had claimed it and multiplied inside the soft organs, gorging on the entrails. Father and son gathered the scattered items that belonged to the dead: a loose shoe, a bag filled with mouldy food, broken glasses."
"The letter from Roosevelt McCrary that upended Georgie’s life came the morning of her seventieth birthday—written on Camp Minnie HaHa stationery and dated June 18, 2007. The handwriting sloped, the way Georgie’s father’s had been, the way children were taught to write script in the thirties—the paper smudged from handling. He must have written Georgie and then reread the letter again and again for months before he decided to mail it."
"There was still my father. After Daniel proposed, we stayed on the bed and made a flurry of calls, starting with our closest friends. In a few hours, everyone knew. Everyone, that is, except my father. My father was different. Most of my life we hadn’t had a working telephone number for him. My mother would dial and a recording would click on saying that the line had been disconnected and that there was no new number. Eventually we’d hear from him again, often from overseas. He and his wife Lucille traveled to Macau, to Rio, to Singapore."
"He heard a buzzing in his head that he took at first to be a dream, but of course he no longer could dream. What was it then? Was it in his head after all? He called up his familiar. Almost immediately, the noise stopped."
"Her face was staring up at me from the front page of The New York Times. On the right edge of the grainy black-and-white photograph taken at Kennedy Airport that day forty-four years earlier, I could just make out the crescent-shaped smudge that had been the tip of my elbow, before I’d been digitally amputated from the frame. For years a copy of the original picture, with me still included, had hung on the wall of my law office, signed “To Peter with love.” Clients would frequently remark on it, such was her fame in those days."
"The border guard studied the identity papers Adamonis had kept hidden through his escape out of shattered Russia, looking from his photo to his face, from his photo to his face. He told Adamonis to stay where he was on the train platform. Adamonis set down his suitcase and briefcase and pulled the collar of his woollen coat around his neck. The guard’s superior came back without the passport and asked Adamonis to follow him."
"We could only tell it was morning by the fact that we’d woken up. Without any windows in the room, there was no light to tell us. e sounds of wind and rain had stopped. There was an eerie, peaceful feeling in the room. The candles had burned down to nothing just before we’d fallen asleep. We’d watched each one wink out in the darkness. en Jaden had gotten the couch ready for him to sleep on, and I’d covered my head with the blankets and squeezed my eyes shut as tight as I could."
"Geraldine arrived at the Brooklyn Public Library an hour after the sun had dropped out of sight. The air was cool but not cold, and the snow was softening to slush. She watched middle-aged people carefully make their way up the steps and kids hunched under the weight of their backpacks stream out of the library’s revolving door. An aroma of ham sandwiches and pencil erasers filled the main hall."
"We came to Berlin in the fall of 2012, and at first everything was fine. We lived on Vogelstrasse, next to a park. Across the road was an Apotheke, and next to that a retirement home, and next to that a residential school for orphans. The school was once a home for single mothers, but eventually the mothers moved on and only the children were left. The school is made up of two cheerless structures—one noticeably newer than the other—behind waist-high cinderblock walls and giant fir trees. In the evenings the children ran in the park, jumping on trampolines and kicking around balls, their voices cutting through the frigid air clear as the bell ringing. In the mornings they sat in the courtyard behind the short fence to craft wooden animals and osier baskets under the watchful eyes of their minders."
"He went out in the morning to look at a painting. It was early, so he had set his alarm, but he didn’t even need it—ten minutes before it was supposed to ring, his eyes came open, both at once. Was that usually the way? Did some people open one eye and then, after a while, the other? How many people woke but kept their eyes closed, trying to stay inside the cylinder of sleep? These were all good questions, but he needed to be out of the house to see the painting."
"Through a gap in the curtain, made by one stained finger, and if parted wide enough for a spider to slide through, Berg could watch the illuminated palace across the road lighting up the solid Victorian blocks, surrounded by parked vehicles. On the right a triangular patch of churchyard; perhaps that’s what accounted for the burnt smell that invaded his room every night, if some paper was stuffed in the cracks, and he remembered to close the window, then the smell might be kept out. He pulled the window right down, and remained gloating over the couples that entered the dance hall. Once he had ventured across, and brought back a giggling piece of fluff, that flapped and flustered, until he was incapable, apologetic, a dry fig held by sticky hands. Well I must say you’re a fine one, bringing me all the way up here, what do you want then, here are you blubbering, oh go back to Mum. Lor’ wait until I tell them all what I got tonight, laugh, they’ll die. Longing to be castrated; shaving pubic hairs. Like playing with a doll, rising out of the bath, a pink jujube, a lighthouse, outside the rocks rose in body, later forming into maggots that invaded the long nights, crawled out of sealed walls, and tumbled between the creases in the sheets."
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