“The man had no face. Or more precisely, he had a flap of skin stretched over the maw of his head, a way station between the busted gourd his face had been and the crude child’s rendering of a face it may, after dozens of surgeries, someday be.”
“There’s something going on over there . . . Farther off, beyond the crowd of people who have been prevented from moving forward by a barrier of police and Paris guards; they spread in unequal streams over both sides of the road like long stagnant black pools . . .”
