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The Quiet One: invisible as an expelled breath and born halfway down the cracks through which he is destined to slip.
He was not that father conjured up in mass-market paperbacks: that mad, cruel, belittling, wife-beating drunkard, dredged up from the basement of Fiction 101 to explain away the wounded protagonist’s maligned and fateful existence.
We speak of zombies as the undead, but I discovered in that moment that the true zombies are unalive.
I wanted to swallow the world whole. Anger boiled in me, and grief swelled like a tsunami out in the middle of the mindless Pacific, invisible to the innocents on shore, yet out there nonetheless, gathering intensity, blind and unfeeling and utterly unstoppable.
“Books—words—hold power. Not magic. Not wonder. Power. Power to convince you of things, even things that do not exist.”
Some secrets must be shared, the cost of keeping them too high.
Men don’t share secrets like boys do. As a boy becomes a man, he shares less about what’s inside him.
Men do things together. Bowl. Fish. Share a beer. Talk bullshit. But it’s not like when we are boys. Our openness, our freedom, closes down. Out of survival and . . . self-respect.”
It didn’t take much to disappear in those ancient days before cameras recorded every corner of our lives, and the unholy internet created the mythology that your business was every stranger’s business, and every stranger’s business was yours.
