"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."
"They call us revenants, those who return. Restless for this world, we pass each other in mute recognition, for to be silent and solitary is our essential condition. But death doesn’t end our thirst for a human touch, a human voice calling our name."
"They enter the city proper at Cripplegate and walk south down Little Wood Street. It seems to George like any other London day. The Walloons are sitting in a semicircle waiting to be shaved at the sign of the Pheasant. A dirty ragamuffin with a tame squirrel sitting on his shoulder is begging for money. At the corner of Silver Street a woman throws water over a vagrant lying beside her front door. He seems untroubled so she hits him with the bucket and still gets no reaction. It is entirely possible that he is dead."
"I wore red capris on the plane. After I’d resolved to go to you, I couldn’t imagine wearing anything else. The red made me feel bold, like a matador. I hadn’t been able to sleep the night before, and it was still dark when I’d risen from bed and stuffed my suitcase with summer clothing. Despite my fevered state, I’d had the presence of mind to fill my backpack with old photographs, graphite and ink, and the best of my drawings."
"Here is my impression of a play: Okay, so first you gotta imagine it’s a hotel room, right? Just a normal, boring-looking hotel room, on the nice end of things, as far as hotel rooms go. And the audience is coming in, and they’re taking their seats in this dinky little theater in lower Manhattan, barely bigger than a Winnebago, this theater, with seats that feel like someone just glued down some thin fabric over a block of hard metal. The main thing of a theater—like the whole point of it—is that there’s going to be a lot of sitting in it, so you’d think they would at least consider investing in some comfortable chairs. Word to the wise: if they can’t even get that part right, which absolutely most of the time they cannot, then buckle the fuck up, because I can tell you right now you are in for an ordeal of an evening."
"I was born in this city. Amsterdam, of course, is not a real city, except in the eyes of people from outside. We, the ones who were born here, immediately recognize the provincial from the way he moves, the way he walks, the way he holds his head. The man from the provinces who thinks he’s ended up in a real city. He walks as though he were in Paris or Rome. He admires his reflection in the store windows and congratulates himself on his decision to exchange his provincial life for a stay in this city, which is not a real city at all."
"Friday to Monday was an Oval-shaped binge. Their pupils were Ovals, their kidneys elongated themselves into Ovals, all the loose change in their pockets melted into Ovals and spent itself, serotonin molecules morphed into large and bubbly Ovals, Oval sperm jetted from Oval testicles through vaginal canal toward ovarian Ovals. Anja dubbed Louis “The Giver” and together they spent a thousand euros, at least, in forty-eight hours. Most surprising of all, Anja thought, was that her knowledge of the artificial nature of her instincts to spend, to give, and to love during those hours in no way dampened the urges to do those things. Far from detracting from their validity, her knowledge that her feelings were chemically induced by Oval even lent a certain righteousness to her acting upon them, a feeling of fully justified liberation."
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