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Why had Lucas liked this book? It was, I supposed, good on a sentence level. (Was it, though? Could an oyster-redolent pouch glisten in the dark?)
“Sweetie, if it was optional to feel better, why would you not want to do it?” my mother asked. “But then why don’t we all just do recreational drugs?” My mother explained the reasons that we didn’t all just do recreational drugs. Street drugs were highly addictive, so that over time you had to keep upping the dose to get the same effect, and got sick if you couldn’t get it. They affected the control centers of the brain, leading to hazardous behavior, and were unregulated, so we didn’t know what was in them. They were illegal, meaning that if you bought them, you were continuing a system that
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That had been a big reason why I had wanted so much to get into Harvard: I’d been sure it would be full of fortunate, resourceful, courageous people who had some better-conceived plan for life that I could learn about. It was a great disappointment to find that, even at Harvard, most people’s plan was to have children and amass money for them. You would be talking to someone who seemed like they viewed the world as a place of free movement and the exchange of ideas, and then it would turn out they were in a huge hurry to get everything interesting over with while they were young.
But the curtain came down again almost immediately, everything went back to how it had been, and I understood that what had been revealed to me at this sadomasochism-themed party was the true face of all parties: how they were all, in one way or another, sadomasochism-themed.
How could a key even be a key if they were all the same? Wasn’t the point that each key was different? I tried to think it through, on the way to the bathroom. Was it related to whether your goal was to keep out many different people, or keep in one person?
