Sometimes — like now, when things fell against him and every turn he took brought him up against another vicious twist of the knife, another hammering on the bruises he’d already collected — it would be comforting to think that it was all designed, all preordained, all already written, and you just turned the pages of some great and inviolable book . . . Maybe you never did get a chance to write your own story (and so his own name, even that attempt at terms, mocked him).
