Flesh

by David Szalay

He realizes that the things that are so important to him—the things that happened, and that he saw there, the things that left him feeling that nothing would ever be the same again—they just aren’t important here. Those things have no reality here. That’s what it feels like. So it makes you feel slightly insane or something, to have those things inside you, when they seem to have no reality here.

It was that the money, insomuch as it was a factor, will have operated by making her find him actually more attractive as a person than she otherwise would have done, though to what exact degree of difference is obviously impossible to say, so that to even ask the question seems pointless, especially since those sorts of uncertainties, to do with what exactly it is that draws us to another person, in the end surely characterize every decision of that kind, every decision about who we spend our lives with.

“He said you exemplify a primitive form of masculinity. He said he was surprised that I ever found that attractive.”