"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."
