The Infinite Blacktop: A Claire DeWitt Novel (Claire DeWitt Mysteries, #3)

by Sara Gran

People wanted to tell you the truth. They just didn’t want it to be true, and they didn’t know they wanted to tell it.

It didn’t sound so self-destructive to me. I guess it depended on who you thought your self was and what exactly you would be destroying. Was your self the part of you that wanted to make money? Merritt sounded pretty ready to destruct that. But maybe his self was really the other part—the part that wanted to go swimming.

I pushed away everything except my sheer will to live—that will that had left me so many times before. But now it burned bright enough I thought we might burn down the whole fucking world together, my will and I.

There was an energy to Los Angeles that was sharp and would cut you if you didn’t recognize it. Every grain of sand in the beaches and desert buried under the city was a little razor, ready and willing to wound.

“Crabs in a barrel. One tries to get out, presumably to some kind of a better life, and the other crabs will pull him back down. They actually do this, you should see it sometime. It’s really pretty extraordinary. Although, who knows, maybe the crab majority knows something the escapee doesn’t.

But age isn’t just time passing. It’s time breaking you—your will, your heart, your beliefs.

She didn’t smile often and everything she said had a kind of seriousness to it that you might have been able to laugh at except most of what she said seemed to be true.

“What do men do?” I asked, although I was pretty sure I knew. They did what women did, but worse, and thought murder was a good way to solve problems.

Merritt didn’t care about politics. I think that’s disgraceful. I think it’s your civic obligation to be utterly fucking furious about politics.

None of us were perfect. No one was complete. People weren’t designed to be pure; everyone needed parts of everyone else: money, time, sex, labor, tears, attention. We were all filthy; all contaminated by each other.

You know what men are like. We don’t need to talk every day for our relationships to be real. Most of the time, we don’t even need to talk at all.

I wanted to take every ounce of pain I had ever felt and condense it and transform it into something terrible and beautiful and throw it back to the world and say Now do you see how wrong you were? Don’t you fucking see it?

People, in my experience, never really saw themselves at all—at best they saw a distorted, reversed, mirror image. And, if nothing else, the messy and fucked-up little pieces that you didn’t even know you had would give you away in the end.

“When your heart is broken,” she said, “you can cling to your old, ugly, broken heart, and let it make you ugly. Or you can let that broken heart fall away and die, and let something new and beautiful be born.

All the big things in life, the enormous transitions in and out of existence, in and out of partnership, motions through and across space—if you trace them back to their origins, all of them start with something small. A look that came out wrong. A misplaced word. One single egg and one lonely, lustful interloper.

“Sometimes the past comes up on us like a ghost. Sometimes life is like a haunted house. But there’s no way to leave. You just have to make your peace with the ghosts.”