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“Well,” I say, “life is the process of learning shit that you never ever wanted to hear.”
It’s a good building with good people, and on the second landing there’s a bunch of flowers in a vase that Mrs. Khan puts out on her little table, the one the superintendent says is a fire risk but never actually removes because he’s a human being too.
it isn’t just scale she has, it’s density, as if the ordinary world has to make space for her, and does. You can see the challenge, the wit behind the smile, the sorrow behind the wit.
Family’s never easy, but it gets nastier if everyone’s rich and lives basically forever.
The floor creaks as she leaves, huge hand trailing across my shoulder for just an instant, soft like snow.
Right now the moon is rising behind the ridgeline and the campus streetlamps are lit, each casting an X of shadows over the central path. I walk through the gates and find a guy standing by himself in the middle of the court. He’s short, a little plump, and he wears waistcoats and corduroy so hard you have to think he’s making a statement. Oddly flat lenses in round spectacles, so they catch the light and flicker when he turns his head. I guess he has a certain image to maintain. After all, he’s the Dean.
He stops because I’ve stopped walking, and when he turns around he has to squint because I’m standing between him and one of the lamps. I wait for him to look uncomfortable and lift a hand to shade his eyes.
I don’t know when I fall asleep, but when I wake it hasn’t been enough, or maybe it’s too much and I can’t tell the difference.
He nods and we look at each other like we’re ten years old and trying to share a pushbike. I walk out before one of us fucks it up.
Victor looks like your auntie if your auntie wore a vintage catsuit in burgundy velvet, accessorised with a domino mask. She has silver hair in a boy cut and a lazy smoker’s voice you can’t help but listen to. Last of the great local originals.
You fight like an accountant, Cal. Passionless. Forensic. Absolute. Which of course triggers all the opposites: passion, dreams and disinhibition.
Tania Garcia frowns when she sees me and I can tell she thinks I shouldn’t be there. I think that too. I also think Mullen shouldn’t have shot me and that nice things should be free to nice people and really expensive for assholes, but this is not the day when any of us gets what we want.
I look back at Richard and pay attention the way I should have when I came in. Writing bump on his finger. You only get that if you make notes with a pen, and these days you only do that if you want to engage theta rhythm and parietal lobe activity to remember more, understand faster and you’re prepared to do the work. Richard cares about study.
“Well, shit,” I say, and Maryam the recorder’s clerk says: “Honey, it’s like listening at keyholes. You come down here, you’re never gonna find out anything good.”
Coffee, then work. And hope like hell I can see the edge of the table before I walk right off it.
“Don’t look at me. Serial killer support services is way down at the bottom of my CV. I’m thinking next time I go for an interview I won’t even include it. Now if you’re finished freaking the shit out of me I have a ten o’clock with Mrs. Leydoux’s Bichon.” “With her what now?” “For fuck’s sake, it’s a dog.”
“I never met a man so determined to do himself down. Billions of souls on the planet begging to be admitted to my house, and here you are like a cat in the doorway. Don’t want to go out, won’t come in. Why did you really wait so long to get in touch?”
Man dresses like the bass guitarist in a skiffle band, talks like a priest.
“You’re the shock absorber. From the Titans’ point of view, you stop the masses from realising the extent of their subjugation. You relieve them of the need to exercise raw financial and political power in the protection of their interests where those interests collide with the law. But . . . you also protect ordinary humans from the consequences of that subjugation as best you can. Yours is an equivocal profession. But I hear you’re not entirely an asshole.”
“Used to be we liked stories of the Titans’ misdeeds. We would put them out samizdat, shock sheets. Fucking manifestos of condemnation. We were going to wake people to the injustice inherent in the system. All the things you smooth over, we try to highlight. But those stories don’t catch fire any more. Not that no one cares, but they got fatigue, you know?
“The house always wins.” “The house doesn’t even need to win. There’s no game because the house owns everything. The money you bet with, the air you breathe. The myth is that when the wheel spins it’s any different from when it’s standing still.”
“Ordinary people always underestimate the complexity of revolutions. Revolutionaries, too, of course, but they learn the hard way. And Peter did, too. He tried again.”
“God has been a socialist since 1848 when Karl Marx explained things to him. Ever since.”
It’s a human tragedy, is it not? A brilliant scientist ceased to work in her field and was nearly killed; a dedicated husband became a monster and then despaired; a monster became only more himself.
This is the meaning of the Titans, Mr. Sounder. Beneath their feet, the fabric of the world is torn, and everything of worth flows into the cracks and drains away, leaving only them, and us, and the stained residue of good things burned in their fire.”
There are flavours of disdain and contempt, even boredom, but something deeper, like looking down from a satellite.
If I’d met Maurice’s apartment before Maurice, we might have gotten along better.
