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man at New Hope
“You see, carrots become bright orange because it’s so dark in the ground. They make their own light because the sun never reaches that far—like those fish in the ocean who glow from nothing? So when you eat it, you take in the carrot’s will to go upward.
To heaven.”
The mind in dementia, Hai learned, can be like one of those Etch A Sketch things he had as a kid: a little shake and it vanishes to a grey and otherworldly blankness.
“You wanna be a writer and you want to jump off a bridge? That’s pretty much the same thing, no? A writer just takes longer to hit the water.”
The Brothers Karamazov.
How strange to feel something so close to mercy, whatever that was, and stranger still that it should be found in here of all places, at the end of a road
of ruined houses by a toxic river. That among a pile of salvaged trash, he would come closest to all he ever wanted to be: a consciousness sitting under a lightbulb reading his days away, warm and alone, alone and yet, somehow, still somebody’s son.
“What’s an army anywhere but a bunch of state-sanctioned mass shooters funded by our tax dollars?” he’d said. “Do the deed as a civilian and you get the chair, do it as a soldier and they’ll pin some tinfoil to your chest.”
