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Mr. Harrigan also promised this, but I suppose men who understand business also understand that promises are easy to discard, being as how giving them is free.
Henry Thoreau said that we don’t own things; things own us. Every new object—whether it’s a home, a car, a television, or a fancy phone like that one—is something more we must carry on our backs.
I have total recall of what followed. I have no idea why the bad memories of childhood and early adolescence are so clear, I only know they are. And this is a very bad memory.
I believe you hear a click, not in your head but in your soul, when you find the place where you belong. You can ignore it, but really, why would you?
We’d been like a couple of kids with Del Monte cans connected by a length of waxed string. Which is what most of our modern communications amount to, when you stop to think of it; chatter for the sake of chatter.
In the twenty-first century, I think our phones are how we are wedded to the world. If so, it’s probably a bad marriage.
“That’s terrible.” It was, of course, but instead of horror and terror and grief, all Marty felt was a kind of benumbed dismay.
“The human brain is finite—no more than a sponge of tissue inside a cage of bone—but the mind within the brain is infinite. Its storage capacity is colossal, its imaginative reach beyond our ability to comprehend. I think when a man or woman dies, a whole world falls to ruin—the world that person knew and believed in. Think of that, kiddo—billions of people on earth, and each one of those billions with a world inside. The earth their minds have conceived.”
It’s Thursday afternoon, the weather is fucking gorgeous, and the streets are thronged with people looking forward to the weekend, which is always better than the weekend itself. For Thursday afternoon people, that anticipation is pure. Friday afternoon people have to put anticipation aside and get to work having fun.
Although he never says it (okay, maybe once or twice, while drunk), he thinks maybe music itself is the enemy. He rarely thinks about these issues once he’s in the groove. Once he’s in the groove, music is a ghost. Only the drums matter then. The beat.
but had no wish to spend his off-duty hours in the company of seventy other accountants. He speaks their language, but likes to think he speaks others, as well. At least he did, although some of the vocabulary is now lost.
For a mad moment Chuck actually considers it, and sees the girl is, too. Not in a serious way, but in the way you daydream of an alternate life. One where you play pro baseball or climb Mount Everest or duet with Bruce Springsteen at a stadium concert. Then Chuck laughs some more and shakes his head. As the girl tucks her third of the take into her purse, she is also laughing.
He thinks the girl nailed it when she used the word magic. Sometimes there is such a thing. Not much, but a little. Like finding a forgotten twenty in the pocket of an old coat.
What he will remember—occasionally—is how he stopped, and dropped his briefcase, and began to move his hips to the beat of the drums, and he will think that is why God made the world. Just that.
The man did not fade, as ghostly apparitions did in movies; he was just gone, insisting he had never been there in the first place. He wasn’t, Chuck thought. I will insist that he wasn’t, and I will live my life until my life runs out. I am wonderful, I deserve to be wonderful, and I contain multitudes. He closed the door and snapped the lock shut.
Home is only two miles away, and home is where the heartache is.
As she does, she feels how close the bones lie under that thin and flabby flesh, and realizes her mother is old. How can she dislike an old woman who so obviously needs her help? The answer seems to be quite easily.
It’s liking that got lost, and love without liking is like a chain with a manacle at each end.
“That makes me think of an old country song by Travis Tritt.” She sounds calm enough but she can’t take her eyes from his, where the sclera shimmers into the iris and the iris shimmers into the pupil. For the time being, they’re countries with unstable borders. “It’s called ‘Here’s a Quarter, Call Someone Who Cares.’ ”
It was a good time, because everything you saw and heard was possible grist for the mill. Everything was malleable. The mind could build a city, remodel it, then raze it, all while you were taking a shower or shaving or having a piss. Once you began, however, that changed. Every scene you wrote, every word you wrote, limited your options a little more. Eventually you were like a cow trotting down a narrow chute with no exit, trotting toward the—
Reality was deep, and it was far. It held many secrets and went on forever.
It was having too many words. Was it a copse or a grove? Was it flaring or glaring? Or maybe staring? Was a character sunken eyed or hollow-eyed? Oh, and if hollow-eyed was hyphenated, what about sunken eyed?
He could tell himself to let go of the small stuff like rocking chairs versus bench, to let the story carry him, but when he looked at the screen, every word there seemed wrong. Every word seemed to have a better one hiding behind it, just out of sight.
