Galveston: From the creator of True Detective

by Nic Pizzolatto

“It doesn’t seem fair, because it’s random. But that’s why it’s fair. You get me? It’s fair like a lottery’s fair.”

The bullet train had more appeal than getting sick, but the problem with suicide is that by the time anybody goes through with it, the damage is already done.

I couldn’t stop glancing at her legs and thighs. Desire always seems vaguely humiliating.

I remember a buddy of mine once telling me that every woman you loved was a mother and sister you didn’t have, at once, and that what you were always really looking for was the female part of yourself, your female animal or something. This guy could get away with saying something like that because he was a junkie and read books.

“The past isn’t real, Roy.”

A dragonfly kept circling my head as if it had something to tell me, and the air of the hot night was like breathing ashes. In the distance I could hear the cars pass whoosh-whoosh-whoosh like the great heartbeat of some huge animal that had swallowed me.

You’re born and forty years later you hobble out a bar, startled by your own aches. Nobody knows you. You steer down lightless highways, and you invent a destination because movement is key. So you head toward the last thing you have left to lose, with no real idea what you’re going to do with it.

“Did it hurt?” the boy asks. I tell him, “I don’t remember.”

I thought about things you can’t survive, even if they don’t kill you.

I had the same fearful sense I had as a boy, when my stomach would hurt and my back would become stiff, and I would want to wander alone in the fields for days like a sick dog.

Still, there was a bored sadness to her. And a resignation I’d seen on faces my whole life—people giving up, crossing over to that place without struggle—and I wanted to alter that.

When I read I got involved in the words and what they were saying so that I didn’t measure the passing of time in typical ways. I was surprised to learn that there was this freedom made of nothing but words. Then I felt like I had missed some crucial point, a long time ago.

All this reading increased my thinking. I could picture things in ways I hadn’t been able to before. Like I’ve said, though—none of this made me a different person. I know who I am.