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His life had been disrupted, but not his billing cycles.
The ugly truth was that these patients weren’t here to be cured. There were no cures for them. They had illnesses that had to be managed, by them and by those who treated them. They were like ships that would never find a shore. The most you could do was bring them supplies; the most they could do was get used to the rocking, the unpredictability, of the vast, impenetrable ocean below them.
He looked down at Coffee with a look of pleading. Would Coffee go in first? But Coffee just shook his head. Coffee sure wasn’t going in to investigate on Pepper’s behalf. He wasn’t about to be that black guy. (You know, the one who scouts ahead and gets his ass sliced in two. Somewhere near the first ten minutes of the horror movie. Although, to be fair, moviemakers have largely stopped that practice. Now there’s usually one amiable but forgettable white person who dies first, and then they kill off all the nonwhite cast members.)
He suddenly understood this back-and-forth as a kind of conditioning. It wasn’t about whether or not he took his pills, and it wasn’t about whether or not some kids had a little weed in their pockets. This wasn’t about an infraction, but dictating a philosophy of life: certain types of people must be overseen. Pepper hadn’t considered this a problem before, he realized, because he hadn’t been one of those types. Until now.
This was the new American Austerity. The reality of our lives in the aftermath of economic disaster. The tighter belts, the slashed spending, the death of compromise. The twenty-first century threatened to look a bit like the nineteenth. The Century of Sharp Elbows was upon us. This economic prudence was supposed to affect everyone, but you could bet it was going to whip some people much worse.
YouTube! How quickly that silly phrase sounded like a high point in human culture. To go online and witness someone’s ugly kid doing something cute. To watch snippets of great movies that had been overdubbed with grating music by some moron who thought they were improving the film. To stumble across human beings with insipid thoughts, video cameras, and the utter lack of humility that made them use one to immortalize the other! Of course, Pepper should’ve registered Josephine’s remark about the sharks. The horror of those numbers. The outsized power of fear and the way it reshapes reality. But
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Ariel, Darkness Visible, The Noonday Demon, The Yellow Wallpaper, The Golden Notebook, Wide Sargasso Sea, Hard Cash, He Knew He Was Right, Angelhead, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti.
worth checking out
Pulled his coat, as old heads used to say.
To inform, to teach, to let one in on a secret
Destiny. Fate. Solace for losers. And a defense for the ones who’d hoarded success.
But Sue didn’t rush to join them as she might have on any other night in the past. When she looked at Pepper, she didn’t want to stay quiet. She didn’t mind if they spoke for a little longer. Pepper, sensing that he’d passed some hurdle, some gate, felt a flush in his chest and arms. He said, “The thing I’ve been thinking about, as I’m reading these letters, is that there’s actually two Vincent Van Goghs.”
Really materful and light touch shifting PoV
He knew that seduction was 96 percent preparation. (The other 4 percent was brushing your teeth.)
People compare that kind of movement to a clock’s pendulum or a metronome, but really they must be fucking joking. To compare a woman’s butt with anything man-made is to denigrate the first and elevate the second.
But what was she going to do? Was she supposed to comfort him about how he couldn’t protect her? When she was the one actually facing extradition?
A profound and concisely compassionate summation of the 21st C "White Man's Burden."
Fuck that. Sue couldn’t dredge up the patience. She also hadn’t told him the straight truth. She’d told him she had less than a week before she’d be deported, but really it was happening later today. (Less than a week could mean six days, after all, or two.) She couldn’t dream of a better way to spend her last night. Sharing these feelings, those touches, with him. All that might’ve been ruined if he knew how close to the end they really were. “Why are you so quiet now?” Sue asked. Pepper lay with his right arm out and her head on his bicep. He closed his arm around her chest. “I guess I was
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I don't think I've ever seen a writer so dedicately and masterfully work PoV for rhetorical purposes.
“Your dream is about what you want to do, not what I need.”
“I’m sorry, Pepper. I am. Hard times make people scared. And scared people see monsters everywhere.”
This is America:
“One day the truth came to me. A wise man once said that every system is designed to give you the results you actually get. If you understand that, you’ll see that this system is working.” “For some people,” Pepper said. Dr. Anand shook his head emphatically. “No. Wrong. The system is working exactly right for those it was intended for. That’s why it hasn’t been fixed. Because it isn’t broken!
“The system is working and it hates us.” He shook his head and looked at his empty, open hands. “Sometimes I can see why people believe in the Devil.”
They’d just have to practice patience now. Take the long view. Success is airmail, not email.
“That’s the funny thing,” she said. “Men always want to die for something. For someone. I can see the appeal. You do it once and it’s done. No more worrying, not knowing, about tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. I know you all think it sounds brave, but I’ll tell you something even braver. To struggle and fight for the ones you love today. And then do it all over again the next day. Every day. For your whole life. It’s not as romantic, I admit. But it takes a lot of courage to live for someone, too.”
Pepper remembered a quote he’d read once, it was attributed to James Hetfield, the lead singer of Metallica. Hetfield was asked the difference between himself and Sting. (Why that comparison? Who can say?) Hetfield said the difference between him and Sting was that he read a lot of books, too, but he didn’t need you to know that.
“Do you know what people would say, in these mining towns, when they saw one of these miners falling apart? Walking through town muttering and swinging at phantoms? They said the Devil in Silver got them. It became shorthand. Like someone might say, ‘What happened to Mike?’ And the answer was always the same. ‘The Devil in Silver got him.’ ”
“I’m saying they were dying,” Louis said. “They definitely weren’t making that up. But it wasn’t a monster that was killing them. It was the mine.”
That’s when he came to realize that it can be honorable to stand alone, arguing for a righteous cause. But sometimes “taking a stance” becomes confused with “just being an asshole.” It had taken quite awhile, but on this late night LeClair the Rat finally accepted that, long ago, he’d turned into a prick.
Because Dorry saw that this man wasn’t monstrous, he was tragic.
He’d done more right than wrong tonight.
(His name is Robert Paulson. His name is Robert Paulson.)
*smiles*
At the Vincent Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, there’s a bit of text printed on the wall of the second-floor landing. It explains Van Gogh’s ambition as a painter; that Van Gogh viewed his work as a kind of “love letter” to humanity. He hoped to be a great artist, but not simply to bring praise upon himself, his talent. (Though that would’ve been nice, dammit.) He hoped to reflect the world’s own glory, with love. An artistic impulse, but one not exclusive to artists. For instance, Coffee. For instance, Dorry. And now, Pepper. The aspiration is so rarely rewarded, or even understood, that most
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