W.D. Clarke

I suppose at a

I suppose at a certain point, if you’re not a man of belief already, if you don’t have an ideology to fall back on, you believe what you have to. That’s what I like about this work. It forces certain choices into stark relief. In such a situation, I find it comforting that you must act with absolute honesty. So now, be honest. Take in the smell. You’re lost and dying slow. Right now you’re like the mariners of old. You’re in the doldrums and there are no winds that can save you. In such situations, in such climes, with the sea becalmed and water running out, they’d toss their horses overboard. Take stock. It’s time to abandon what you can live without.

Ethan did not trust his own anger. It was the sham that masked what everything else masked.

Illuminated clouds of starlings jerked and turned and overflew the city like bellowed embers.

Mirabelle turns as far from Her as she can. There is no one who will love her without rubbing her face in the world’s trash.

You don’t know it, but you’re peering at the end of your world here. At deviants and dogs and murderers. It’ll be a war on your borders soon enough. Arizona, Texas, California. There’ll be plague on your streets and in your hospitals. Consider the refugees into Mexico. Consider the trade problems. I suppose you think you could live without bananas?

We all have the same agenda, just different employers.

You could abandon your vestments of the past here, because here what you did not abandon was stripped from you anyway.

But Cunningham had been wrong about Ethan. FARC? Guerrillas? He had no stake in those things. If forced to have an opinion, he’d come out against them every time. But he’d also come out against El Lobo, his military cronies and their psychotic death squads. He’d come out against the gangs and the cartels and the people who seemed content to let them hack the country into despair. He’d come out against the corrupt domination of the poor by the vastly wealthy, the corporations that undermined any attempts to establish a middle class, the U.S. fruit companies and Japanese mining firms and local sugar plantations that lined El Lobo’s coffers. Here, Ethan would come out against everything. It was like Doyle said at Tireisias’s cabin: things are what they are, or they’re worse.

I suppose at a

I suppose at a certain point, if you’re not a man of belief already, if you don’t have an ideology to fall back on, you believe what you have to. That’s what I like about this work. It forces certain choices into stark relief. In such a situation, I find it comforting that you must act with absolute honesty. So now, be honest. Take in the smell. You’re lost and dying slow. Right now you’re like the mariners of old. You’re in the doldrums and there are no winds that can save you. In such situations, in such climes, with the sea becalmed and water running out, they’d toss their horses overboard. Take stock. It’s time to abandon what you can live without.

Ethan did not trust his own anger. It was the sham that masked what everything else masked.

Illuminated clouds of starlings jerked and turned and overflew the city like bellowed embers.

Mirabelle turns as far from Her as she can. There is no one who will love her without rubbing her face in the world’s trash.

You don’t know it, but you’re peering at the end of your world here. At deviants and dogs and murderers. It’ll be a war on your borders soon enough. Arizona, Texas, California. There’ll be plague on your streets and in your hospitals. Consider the refugees into Mexico. Consider the trade problems. I suppose you think you could live without bananas?

We all have the same agenda, just different employers.

You could abandon your vestments of the past here, because here what you did not abandon was stripped from you anyway.

But Cunningham had been wrong about Ethan. FARC? Guerrillas? He had no stake in those things. If forced to have an opinion, he’d come out against them every time. But he’d also come out against El Lobo, his military cronies and their psychotic death squads. He’d come out against the gangs and the cartels and the people who seemed content to let them hack the country into despair. He’d come out against the corrupt domination of the poor by the vastly wealthy, the corporations that undermined any attempts to establish a middle class, the U.S. fruit companies and Japanese mining firms and local sugar plantations that lined El Lobo’s coffers. Here, Ethan would come out against everything. It was like Doyle said at Tireisias’s cabin: things are what they are, or they’re worse.