A Conspiracy of Tall Men

by Noah Hawley

“I’m too cynical to be rich,” he says. He equates financial success with a certain soullessness.

“It’s important to try to understand the things you fear most.”

He was a man who could no longer sleep alone without landscaping the pillows beside him to simulate a human form.

There is always the possibility that his emotions might rub off on them. Disaster survivors are as contagious as the poor.

We can all be led in the directions we want to go.

childhood. Alice just laughed and told her that Linus had never had a childhood, just a series of years spent at a reduced size.

“It’s not so much a family,” said Claudia, “as a series of tactical maneuvers.”

That would presume the existence of meaning in the universe, and Linus is unconvinced and unwilling to concede such a basic point.

She has the frown lines of an attorney. Linus imagines that she is a woman who has developed a small addiction to Valium.

“The only thing worse than the pickup lines of cult members is the cafeteria food in New York City public schools.”

Inside she feels a tremendous self-loathing. Not pretty, not strong, not smart, she thinks. It is her own peculiar mantra.

“How are you, Mr. Owen? Really, deep down inside.” “There is no deep down inside. Deep down inside has been closed for renovations.”

The radicals of the nineties are now right wing. In many ways the issues are the same, but their champions are the gun-toting, Bible-thumping snake handlers, the rural Baptist senator’s nephews.

“For the government it’s as if a houseguest has suddenly peed into a silver tureen at a party in honor of Billy Graham. How rude of your citizens to suddenly question

“Paranoia is caused by a chemical imbalance. Suspicion is a sign of rational thinking.”

A pride of lonely mothers huddle their baby carriages in the parking lots of supermarkets and speak of husbands who work weekends.

His family is an accident of history, a random assortment of people brought together by birth and blood. He has always done everything to distance himself from them.

“She cut him down. Given the opportunity her comments to him were always skewed toward the negative.”

Her life is not turning out how she wanted it. Linus’s needs are simpler than hers. As far as he’s concerned, they have everything they require.”

Being without electronics for more than a few hours is like being kidnapped by a cult deprogrammer in a cheap brown suit and taken to a fluorescent motel somewhere in New Jersey.

collection of traveling art exhibits that appear interesting on first examination and then prove to be the aesthetic equivalent of an in-flight magazine.

“A man alone never betrays himself.”

“My point is, if you stay out of love then you avoid a world of pain.”

End of the twentieth century and every well-armed constitutionalist thinks he’s Martin Luther.

I want a collective sense of advancement. I want you to grow like I’m growing, to experience new things. I want more than just routine.

You will grow to anticipate each other’s wants. You are volunteering to abandon mystery and slip into a comfortable understanding. That’s marriage.