Robert has never been kind to his body; he’s worn it like an old leather coat tossed in oceans and left crumpled in corners, and Less saw its marks and scars and aches not as failures of age but the opposite: the evidence, as Raymond Chandler once wrote, of “a gaudy life.” It is only the carrier of that wonderful mind, after all. A case for the crown. And Robert has cared for that mind like a tiger with her young; he has given up drinking and drugs, kept a strict schedule of sleep. He is good, he is careful. And to steal that—to steal his mind—burglar Life! Like cutting a Rembrandt from its
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