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It looked like the skeleton of a murdered idea.
He realized how miserable and unknown and vulnerable he was in the world. The universe seemed to shriek and clatter and roar around him like a huge and indifferent jalopy rushing down a hill and toward the lip of a bottomless chasm. His lips began to tremble, and then he cried a little.
Protest did not work. Violence did not work. The world was what it was,
Comes in White Only.
The mask of the well-to-do young hausfrau on her way back from the market now hung in tatters and shreds. Beneath it was something from the cave, something with twitching lips and rolling eyes. Perhaps it had been there all along.
They looked oddly incomplete, like pictures with holes for eyes or a jigsaw puzzle with a minor piece missing. It was a lack of desperation, Richards thought. No wolves howled in these bellies. These minds were not filled with rotted, crazed dreams or mad hopes.
He would go ahead with it, fill in the blanks until there was an “accident” and the air car was blown into bent bolts and shards of metal (“. . . terrible accident . . . the trooper has been suspended pending a full investigation . . . regret the loss of innocent life . . .”—all this buried in the last newsie of the day, between the stock-market report and the Pope’s latest pronouncement),
The pretty, self-assured woman with the wraparound shades was all gone. Richards wondered if that woman would ever reappear. He did not think so. Not wholly.
The poor you will have with you always.
True. Even Richards’s loins had produced a specimen for the killing machine. Eventually the poor would adapt, mutate. Their lungs would produce their own filtration system in ten thousand years or in fifty thousand, and they would rise up, rip out the artificial filters and watch their owners flop and kick and drum their lives away, drowning in an atmosphere where oxygen played only a minor part, and what was futurity to Ben Richards? It was all only bitchin’.
He regarded the peace longingly, the way a man in the desert regards water.
Their names came and repeated, clanging in his mind like bells, like words repeated until they are reduced to nonsense. Say your name over two hundred times and discover you are no one.
plangently
