Sometimes it looks to me like nobody in particular lives there. Not that it's that messy; I'm a good if somewhat robotic housekeeper, and even remember to dust the tops of framed posters and things, but I have these times when the place abruptly gives me a kind of low-grade chill, with its basic accumulation of basic consumer goods. I mean, it's not like I want to fill it up with cats or houseplants or anything, but there are moments when I see that anyone could be living there, could own those things, and it all seems sort of interchangeable, my life and yours, my life and anybody's.
There's a segment on Kings of Sleep; it's like you're on a motorcycle at midnight, no lights but somehow you don't need them, blasting out along a cliff-high stretch of coast highway, so fast that you hang there in a cone of silence, the bike's thunder lost behind you. Everything, lost behind you... It's just a blink, on Kings, but it's one of the thousand things you remember, go back to, incorporate into your own vocabulary of feelings. Amazing. Freedom and death, right there, right there, razor's edge, forever.
Chrome: her pretty childface smooth as steel, with eyes that would have been at home on the bottom of some deep Atlantic trench, cold gray eyes that lived under terrible pressure. They s~id she cooked her own cancers for people who crossed her, rococo custom variations that took years to kill you. They said a lot of things about Chrome, none of them at all reassuring.
Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever−circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm. It is that flat and spectral non−hour, awash in limbic tides, brainstem stirring fitfully, flashing inappropriate reptilian demands for sex, food, sedation, all of the above, and none really an option now.
The Rickson's is a fanatical museum−grade replica of a U.S. MA−1 flying jacket, as purely functional and iconic a garment as the previous century produced. Dorotea's slow burn is being accelerated, Cayce suspects, by her perception that Cayce's MA−1 trumps any attempt at minimalism, the Rickson's having been created by Japanese obsessives driven by passions having nothing at all to do with anything remotely like fashion.
Her mother had once said that when the second plane hit, Win's chagrin, his personal and professional mortification at this having happened, at the perimeter having been so easily, so terribly breached, would have been such that he might simply have ceased, in protest, to exist. She doesn't believe it, but now she finds it makes her smile. "Good night," she says to the dark.
Memory is a funny thing. When I was in the scene, I hardly paid it any mind. I never stopped to think of it as something that would make a lasting impression, certainly never imagined that eighteen years later I would recall it in such detail. I didn't give a damn about the scenery that day. I was thinking about myself. I was thinking about the beautiful girl walking next to me. I was thinking about the two of us together, and then about myself again. It was the age, that time of life when every sight, every feeling, every thought came back, like a boomerang, to me. And worse, I was in love. Love with complications. Scenery was the last thing on my mind.
Haruki Murkami, Men Without Women. Writing inspiration for: Disaffection, loneliness.
Sounds are different in that world. So is the way you experience thirst. And the way your beard grows. And the way baristas at Starbucks treat you. Clifford Brown’s solos sound different, too. Subway-car doors close in new and unexpected ways. Walking from Omote Sando to Aoyama Itchome, you discover the distance is no longer what it once was. You might meet a new woman, but no matter how wonderful she may be (actually, the more wonderful she is, the more this holds true), from the instant you meet, you start thinking about losing her.
The decay spreads over the State, and the sweet smell is a great sorrow on the land. Men who can graft the trees and make the seed fertile and big can find no way to let the hungry people eat their produce. Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby their fruits may be eaten. And the failure hangs over the State like a great sorrow.The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit—and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.
And the smell of rot fills the country.
Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate—died of malnutrition—because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.
The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
They watched storms out there so distant they could not be heard, the silent lightning flaring sheetwise and the thin black spine of the mountain chain fluttering and sucked away again in the dark. They saw wild horses racing on the plain, pounding their shadows down the night and leaving in the moonlight a vaporous dust like the palest stain of their passing.
It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.
The flames sawed in the wind and the embers paled and deepened and paled and deepened like the bloodbeat of some living thing eviscerate upon the ground before them and they watched the fire which does contain within it something of men themselves inasmuch as they are less without it and are divided from their origins and are exiles. For each fire is all fires, and the first fire and the last ever to be.
"What made it hurt more," the stocky man said, "what made it hurt worse was knowing what they were going to do to you, you know? There you are and they tell you very matter of fact that you made somebody mad, you made a big mistake and now there’s somebody doing time for it, and it isn’t anything personal, you understand, but it just has to be done. Now get your hand out there. You think about not doing it, you know? I was in Sunday School when I was a kid and this nun says to me, stick out your hand, and the first few times I do it she whacks me right across the knuckles with a steel-edged ruler. It was just like that. So one day I says, when she tells me ‘Put out your hand,’ I say, ‘No.’ And she whaps me right across the face with that ruler. Same thing. Except these guys weren’t mad, they aren’t mad at you, you know? Guys you see all the time, maybe guys you didn’t like, maybe guys you did, had some drinks with, maybe looked out for the girls. ‘Hey look, Paulie, nothing personal, you know? You made a mistake. The hand. I don’t wanna have to shoot you, you know.’ So you stick out the hand and—you get to put out the hand you want—I take the left because I’m right-handed and I know what’s going to happen, like I say, and they put your fingers in the drawer and then one of them kicks it shut. Ever hear bones breaking? Just like a man snapping a shingle. Hurts like a bastard."
Amato in a gray suit with a muted red stripe, textured pink shirt with his initials on the left French cuff, a maroon and gold tie, sat at the kidney-shaped, walnut veneer desk and stared. “I got to give it to you,” he said, “you’re a great-looking couple of guys. Come in here about four hours late, you look like shit and you stink. The fuck, you look like you just got out of jail or something.”“His fault,” the first one said. “He was late. I stood around there and I waited for him.”
Both of them wore black boots with red suede inserts. The first one wore an army-green poncho, a frayed gray sweater and faded blue jeans. He had long hair, dirty-blond, and mutton-chop sideburns. The second one wore an army-green poncho, a gray sweatshirt and dirty white jeans. He had long black hair that reached his shoulders. He had the beginnings of a black beard.
“I hadda get my dogs in,” the second one said. “I got fourteen dogs, there. Takes me a while. I can’t, I can’t just go. off some place, leave them dogs out.”
“Maybe he’ll be all right,” Amato said. “Maybe he won’t be all right. Maybe you won’t be. I don’t want nobody getting hurt on this. There’s nothing, there’s no reason why anybody oughta get hurt on this, the guys that go in or the guys that’re in there when the guys go in. This’s money, just money, nothing else. No fuckin’ shit and stuff that’s gonna get everybody all pissed off and everything. It was something that was gonna be around, it was something like that, all right, I could maybe take a chance. I could take a couple guys that I was afraid’d maybe cock off and wreck it, and take their word for it, they’re gonna be all right. So all right, they go in, and they cock off and wreck it, it was a bank or something, it’s gonna be there next week for two guys that’ve got more sense, all right. But this isn’t. It’s not like that. You fuck it up, it’s fuckin’ gone, it’s gonna disappear. I got to think about this. I got to be sure. I’m gonna talk to some people.”
She was tall and spare, light-skinned by Radchaai standards, hair enough lighter than brown to be slightly odd, but not the sort of striking shade that might have been artificial. She frowned habitually, though she wasn’t ill-tempered. She was seventy-six years old and looked much the same as she had in her thirties, and would until she was past a hundred and fifty. Her mother had been a doctor, and her mother before that, and her mother before that. She was, just now, extremely angry with me.
A ship with ancillaries expressed what it felt in a thousand different minute ways. A favorite officer’s tea was never cold. Her food would be prepared in precisely the way she preferred. Her uniform always fit right, always sat right, effortlessly. Small needs or desires would be satisfied very nearly the moment they arose. And most of the time, she would only notice that she was comfortable. Certainly more comfortable than other ships she might have served on.
“Do you still think she controls the empire through brainwashing or threats of execution? Those are there, they exist, yes, but most citizens, like people most places I have been, do what they’re supposed to because they believe it’s the right thing to do. No one likes killing people.”Strigan made a sardonic noise "No one?"
I amended. "Not enough to fill the warships".”
So we travel to one end – whoosh – and all the people seeing us fly by are like, oh my stars, look at that totally amazing ship, what genius tech patched together such a thing, and I’m like, oh, that’s me, Kizzy Shao, you can all name your babies after me – whooosh – and then we get to our start point.
“Behold, my wonderboots! All the kick-ass of an Aeluon assault squad, combined with total ergonomic perfection! It’s podiatric madness! What are they? Are they big tough stompers? Are they comfy kick-arounds? No one knows! There are feats of science happening right over my socks as we speak!”
“Incident report.” That sounds so... I don’t know.’ ‘Inadequate?’ ‘No kidding. I like what Kizzy called it better.’ ‘What was that?’ ‘A “monstro clusterfuck.”’ Ashby laughed dryly. ‘I doubt they have a form for that,’ he said.”
He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men's acts, even the terrible became banal.
He explained to Atro that he now understood why the army was organized as it was. It was indeed quite necessary. No rational form of organization would serve the purpose. He simply had not understood that the purpose was to enable men with machine guns to kill unarmed men and women easily and in great quantities when told to do so. Only he still could not see where courage, or manliness, or fitness entered in.
“There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and the wish for power. You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is ‘superior’ to the other, or trying to prove it. You cannot act like a brother to other people, you must manipulate them, or command them, or obey them, or trick them. You cannot touch another person, yet they will not leave you alone. There is no freedom. It is a box—Urras is a box, a package, with all the beautiful wrapping of blue sky and meadows and forests and great cities. And you open the box, and what is inside it? A black cellar full of dust, and a dead man. A man whose hand was shot off because he held it out to others.”
Joslin put one skeletal hand to her mouth and gave a giggle that only dogs should have heard. Gina still couldn't buy the skinny bitch-twitch as an implant surgeon. Anyone lying on a table who saw that coming on with an implant needle had to be stone-home crazy or dead not to jump up and run away screaming.
He must have stepped directly into the path of her fist, he thought later, adding his own momentum to hers and making the blow more powerful. At the time all he knew was that his head had exploded with color and sensation that did not register as pain until a full second afterwards, so that the secondary hit of his body against the carpeted floor was too slight for notice.When his vision returned he was looking up at an uneven ring of faces hovering over him. The growing pain in his cheek suddenly skyrocketed to unbearable. He closed his eyes and waited for it to recede, but it wouldn't. It was like being tortured, like having all the free-floating anxiety and hostility in the room poured into one little area of his face. He drifted away from consciousness while someone demanded that everyone move back, move back, he needed air, goddammit.
She selected "Coffee, caffeinated, pot" from the drink menu, and this time the message was unblinking. The Surgeons General wish you to be aware that caffeine is associated with chromosome breakage, headaches, tension, anxiety, and impaired motor coordination when taken to excess. In pregnant women birth defects can result in those prone to certain inimical chemistries. Abstinence may be advisable; consult your doctor.Sam stared. A pretentious quickie; that was new. She slapped her palm against the endit square with a defiant flourish. Too late; she had the guilts over the coffee even as she couldn't wait to drink half of it at one gulp. Modern life was making her sick by trying not to make her sick.
You're extracting life by the mouthful. It's the pleasure of knowing that because of your intent, your actions, this being has ceased to exist. It's the feeling of a complex and precious organism expiring little by little, and also becoming part of you. For always. I find this miracle fascinating. This possibility of an indissoluble union.
"I know that when I die somebody’s going to sell my flesh on the black market, one of my awful distant relatives. That’s why I smoke and drink, so I taste bitter and no one gets any pleasure out of my death." She takes a quick drag and says, "Today I’m the butcher, tomorrow I might be the cattle."
I have never understood, and still do not understand the notion that a woman must first endure a victimhood of some sort—abandonment, abuse, oppression of the patriarchy—to be monstrous. Men have always been permitted in fiction and in life to simply be what they are, no matter how dark or terrifying that might be. But with a woman, we expect an answer, a reason. But why would she do it? Why, why, why?
He howls questions to me: Who are you? Why are you doing this? I didn’t do anything to anyone. I don’t deserve this. Why me? This is a failing of men. This same violence, applied to a woman, she does not ask why it is being inflicted upon her, she only struggles unsuccessfully to free herself and grieves the fact she has grieved her entire life, one that she understands fundamentally and innately. That violence simply occurs.
I love Halloween because all the time, everyone wears masks. But one night a year, they do it openly. The dark and forbidden things they wish to be but deny themselves, on Halloween they don’t. On Halloween, they embrace it, all of it. The hidden parts of the world are exposed, if only for one night. And those things that are truly dark are a little less alone.
