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the reek of a black canal, steel racketing steel beneath a swaying train,
he glimpses figures carried from the smoke-blackened car-deck of an Asian ferry.
every passing face is masked, mouths and nostrils concealed behind filters. Some, honoring the Day of the Dead, resemble the silver-beaded jaws of grinning sugar-skulls. Whatever form they take, their manufacturers all make the same dubious, obliquely comforting claims about viroids.
they wore black suits and white cotton shirts. The shirts had obviously cost more than the suits, or at least as much, and they never wore ties or undid the top button.
what they were doing was exposing the integrity of the material’s passage through time.
like what happened to old people on television.
always glad to have him on shift, because he was as determinedly nonviolent a rentacop as you were likely to find. And he probably wasn’t even crazy.
As Hernandez was fond of pointing out, SoCal had stricter regulations for who could or couldn’t be a hairdresser.
anybody who built a stealth house was paranoid to begin with, would always keep the place locked up too tight, no air circulation, and you’d get that bad toxic buildup.
“Time on tv’s all the same time,
you shouldn’t oughta watch tv, not unless you’re gonna pay it attention.”
full of trailer-camp contactee shit
the rising ceramic whine of the twin Kyoceras,
I’M NOT OKAY, YOU’RE NOT OKAY—BUT, HEY, THAT’S OKAY.
Tenderloin’s trash-fires burning so close by, and around them, huddled, all those so terminally luckless, utterly and chemically lost. Faces aglow in the fairy illumination of the tiny glass pipes. Eyes canceled in that terrible and fleeting satisfaction.
Rich people, had to be, and foreign, too. Though maybe rich was foreign enough.
a moderate hill would put him in line for a pig-valve.
she sees the office people walking back and forth, and wonders whether it all means anything or if they’re just walking back and forth.
A century’s-worth of padlocked walk-in freezers, fifty vacuum cleaners charging themselves at a row of numbered stations, rolls of broadloom stacked like logs.
The brooding verbal polychromes of an almost unthinkably advanced decay.”
Decadent. The courier disapproves of decadence. His work brings him into contact with real wealth, genuine power. He meets people of substance. Harwood is wealth without substance.
He’d once seen a Harley done up so that everything that wasn’t triple-chromed was crawling, fast forward, with life-sized bugs. Scorpions, centipedes, you name it.
His jacket, the one she always wore, that had come from D. Lewis, Great Portland Street.
Some of the National Geographics had maps folded into them, and all the countries were big, single blobs of color from one side to the other. And there hadn’t been nearly as many of them. There’d been countries big as anything: Canada, USSR, Brazil. Now there were lots of little ones where those had been. Skinner said America had gone that route without admitting it.
the way to put a poster up forever was use condensed milk for the glue.
I thought of all those billions dead, the annual toll in all the poor places. ‘David,’ I said, ‘how can you contemplate this when the bulk of humanity lives without air-conditioning?’
Cease Upon the Midnight was mutual self-help euthanasia,
Offed themselves with cocktails of legally prescribed drugs. No muss, no fuss. Tidiest suicides around.
it tapped into the part of the brain that kept track of celebrities.
some kind of movie-star lobe. Did people really have those?
He was enormous, over six feet, but the thing that struck Rydell most was a stillness about him, that and some kind of sorrow in his face.
and must begin, now, to systematically sabotage the workplace,” Fiona X said, “or be branded an enemy of the human race.”
Eye Movement Desensitization & Response,
The Bomb, so long awaited, is gone. In its place came these plagues, the slowest of cataclysms.
But this feeling had come, that day, and swallowed everything up inside it, so big you couldn’t really prove it was there except by an arithmetic of absence and the memory of better days.
in a place so bad it was like a piece of broken glass to rub against that big empty. And thereby growing aware of the thing that had swallowed the world, though it was only just visible, and then in sidelong glances. Not a feeling so much as a form of gas, something she could almost smell in the back of her throat, lying chill and inert in the rooms of her subsequent passage.
fingers running nervously over his tools. His hands were like pale dirty animals, capable in their mute and agile way of solving problems that would have hopelessly baffled the man himself.
deserts like you saw on television, then flat green farms where big machines came marching along in rows, doing whatever it was they did. But she remembered the road down from Oregon, the trucks groaning past in the night like lost mad animals, and she tried to picture herself riding down that. No, there wasn’t any place out on a road like that, nothing human-sized, and hardly ever even a light, in all the fields of dark. Where you could walk and walk forever and never come to anything, not even a place to sit down.
How it was, when you lost things, it was like you only knew for the first time that you’d ever had them.
You didn’t wake up every morning and say yes and yes to every little thing. But little things were what it was all made of. Or just somebody to see, there, when you woke
She wasn’t giving off that vibe of perp fear
It was like victim fear,
She gave him a look like you might give a dog that had just told you it was a good day to spend all your money on one particular kind of lottery ticket.
Rydell caught the expression on her face, reflected in the black windshield, then saw how it went sort of blank.
Yamazaki had watched the old man’s hands as they touched each tool in turn, imagining he saw some momentary strength or purpose flow into them there, or perhaps only memories of tasks undertaken, abandoned, completed.
He was talking about how all his life these movies of history had been getting better and better looking. How they’d started out jumpy and black and white, with the soldiers running around like they had ants in their pants, and this terrible grain to them, and the sky all full of scratches. How gradually they’d slowed down to how people really moved, and then they’d been colorized, the grain getting finer and finer, and even the scratches went away. And it was bullshit, he said, because every other bit of it was an approximation, somebody’s idea of how it might have looked, the result of a
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the movies have caught up with memory,
Where he was had the feel of one of those fallen-in edge-cities, the kind of place that went down when the Euro-money imploded.
“We had Revealed Aryan Nazarenes, up in Oregon,” she said. “First Church of Jesus, Survivalist. As soon shoot you as look at you.”
Why? Hell. Because. See people dying, you just walk by like it was television?
