Shutter Island

by Dennis Lehane

took no pleasure from such a lack of land, of visions of land, things you could reach out and touch without your hands dissolving into them.

the migraines that had plagued him since adolescence and that at various times could come so strongly they could temporarily rob him of vision in one eye, turn light into a hailstorm of hot nails,

and had once—only once, thank God—left him partially paralyzed for a day and a half. Migraines, his anyway, never visited during times of pressure or work, only afterward, when all had quieted down, after the shells stopped dropping, after the pursuit was ended.

The trick, Teddy had long since learned, was to stay busy and stay focused. They couldn’t catch you if you didn’t stop running.

“The mind,” he said. “Mine, yours, anyone’s. It’s an engine essentially. That’s what it is. A very delicate, intricate motor. And it’s got all these pieces, all these gears and bolts and hinges. And we don’t even know what half of them do. But if just one gear slips, just one…Have you thought about that?”

“That it’s all trapped in here and you can’t get to it and you don’t really control it. But it controls you, doesn’t it? And if it decides one

day that it doesn’t feel like coming to work?” He leaned forward, and they could see tendons straining in his neck. “Well, then you’re pretty much good and fucked, aren’t you?”

Charm was the luxury of those who still believed in the essential rightness of things. In purity and picket fences.