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which somehow tells her body that she will soon be free of reliance on this particular perimeter.
She has never before determined to try to discover whether or not she might be being followed, but now she does, and will. Somewhere, deep within her, surfaces a tiny clockwork submarine.
The cabin is like some optimally comfy cube-farm, a cluster of automated, supremely ergonomic workstation enclosures. It feels as though, with just a little more engineering, they could simultaneously tube-feed you and tidily exhaust the resulting wastes.
powerful motors devoted to her comfort.
childlike innocence and hardboiled come-on alternating at some frequency beyond perception.
She’s wearing more makeup than she’d usually apply in a month, but it’s been brushed on by Zen-calm professionals, swaying to some kind of Japanese Enya-equivalent.
enough micro-boutiques to make Fred Segal on Melrose look like an outlet store in Montana.
She’s suddenly experiencing full-on London-Tokyo soul-displacement, less a wave than the implosion of an entire universe. She imagines climbing over the bar, past the barman with his pockmarked, oddly convex face, and down behind it, where she might curl up behind a scrim of bottles and attain a state of absolute stasis, for weeks perhaps.
anything Cayce might ever have known about the Anne of Green Gables cult in Japan has just gone up in a puff of synaptic mist.
one of those Tokyo residential corridors, lined with what she assumes are tiny houses, and punctuated with glowing clusters of vending machines.
She’d known that, somehow, and hadn’t liked it, and doesn’t like it that she doesn’t like it.
a cell of professional info-theorists, of some kind, who are also, in this ultimate otaku sense, info-junkies. Perhaps employed in the R&D arm of one or more large corporations.
answering questions in front of an infrared device that registered minute changes in the temperature of the skin around the eyes, the theory being that lying about having packed one’s own bag induced a sort of invisible and inevitable micro-blush.
“It’s more the way it is now than it’s ever been,”
Still more missing strangers had become familiar, then, as she’d made the stations of some unthinkable cross.
People fascinate him, in some peculiarly abstract way: the things they do, though not so much why they do them.
not a place that consisted of buildings, side by side, as she thought of cities in America, but a literal and continuous maze, a single living structure (because still it grew) of brick and stone.
likelihood-filters
She wishes Damien were here. She wishes anyone were here.
The tabloid doesn’t go down any better, seemingly composed in equal measure of shame and rage, as though some inflamed national subtext were being ritually, painfully massaged, for whatever temporary and paradoxical relief this might afford.
She’s met people here who can distinguish workable button holes on a suit cuff at twenty feet.
Cayce Pollard Central Standard might now be approaching its own hour of the wolf, she thinks. Soul too long in a holding pattern.
And dreams of large men, strangers
She is there too, but they can’t seem to see her, or hear her, and she wants them to get out.
she knows she’ll have to tell him
and the rest of it, and she’s afraid to, afraid of what he might say. But if she doesn’t, their friendship, which she values deeply, will start to cease to feel genuine.
The smile, when it breaks through Stella’s pale calm, is a miracle. Or not calm, Cayce thinks, but some hyper-vigilant stillness. Do not move and they will not see us.
you stood all too real a chance of missing the genuine threat, which was invariably less symmetrical, less perfect.
everything Lenin taught us of communism was false, and everything he taught us of capitalism, true.”
what she does, it joins the sea.”
the long white beam of light sweeping the dead ground as it comes, like a lighthouse gone mad from loneliness, and searching that barren ground as foolishly, as randomly, as any grieving heart ever has.
she’d found herself, out of some need she hadn’t understood, down in one of the trenches, furiously shoveling gray muck and bones, her face streaked with tears.
