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America was a great deceptor. Land of Opportunity. Golden Mountain. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. But inside those pretty words, between the pretty coasts, was this: Miles and miles of narrow-minded know-nothings who wanted no more out of life than an excuse to cock their AK-47s and take arms against a sea of troubles. A Great Wall? Ha! This country could never build itself anything as epic as that. America wanted to think of itself as a creator, but all it could do was destroy—fortunes, families, lives. Even the railroads needed the Chinese to come and build them.
Charles was the kind of person who had never in his blessed life thought about where the shit went after he flushed the toilet. It was his privilege to empty his bowels in clean white ceramic bowls, and it was the burden of the world to wash it away.
The people of the world could be divided into two groups: those who used all of their chances, and those who stood still through opportunity after opportunity, waiting for a moment that would never be perfect.
