Drive

Maybe he should turn around. Go back and tell them that’s what life was, a long series of things that didn’t go down the way you thought they would. Hell with it. Either they’d figure it out or they wouldn’t. Most people never did.

He existed a step or two to one side of the common world, largely out of sight, a shadow, all but invisible. Whatever he owned, either he could hoist it on his back and lug it along or he could walk away from it. Anonymity was the thing he loved most about the city, being a part of it and apart from it at the same time.

Time went by, which is what time does, what it is.

Bombs fall and wipe out civilization as we know it, two things come up out of the ashes: roaches and F-150s.

You're not very good at this, are you?' 'At what I do, I'm the best. This isn't what I do.

Think we choose our lives?" "No. But I don't think they're thrust upon us, either. What it feels like to me is, they're forever seeping up under our feet.

What’d you need?" "Desuetude." "Reading again, are we? Could be dangerous. It means to become unaccustomed to. As in something gets discontinued, falls into disuse." "Thanks, man." "That it?" "Yeah, but we should grab a drink sometime.

The whole city was a compass. How could anyone ever have gotten so hopelessly lost here?

I drive. That's what I do. All I do.

Much later, as he sat with his back against an inside wall of a Motel 6 just north of Phoenix, watching the pool of blood lap toward him, Driver would wonder whether he had made a terrible mistake. Later still, of course, there'd be no doubt. But for now Driver is, as they say, in the moment. And the moment includes this blood lapping toward him, the pressure of dawn's late light at windows and door, traffic sounds from the interstate nearby, the sound of someone weeping in the next room.

Rina’s always claimed that I expect too little from life,” Standard said. “Then at least you’ll never be disappointed.

He drove. That was what he did. What he’d always do.

This is what people are talking about when they use words like grace. That moment, that morning, came vividly back to him whenever he thought of it. But soon suspicion set in. He understood well enough that life by very definition is upset, movement, agitation.

We're professionals. People make deals, they need to stick to them. That's the way it works, if it's going to work at all.

Driver had the keys bunched in his hand, one braced and protruding between second and third fingers. Stepping directly forward, he punched his fist at alpha dog's windpipe, feeling the key tear through layers of flesh, looking down as he lay gasping for air.

Why’d you call, boy? What did you want from me?" "The company of a friend, I think." "Always a cheap treat.

He remembered how it had been, everyone knowing everyone else's business, all the open secrets, the lot of them believing they had the only true, real life and all others were counterfeit.

He didn't know. Had he changed, or had the world changed around him? Some days he barely recognized it. Like he'd been dropped off in a spaceship and was only going through the motions, trying to fit in, doing his best imitation of someone who belonged down here.

Fine’s a town I don’t even visit anymore.

Some brainless comedy where actors with perfect white teeth spoke their lines then froze in place to let the laugh track unwind.

My old man was eighty-six per cent white bread and a hundred per cent asshole.

Something radically new, the producer tells me. Think Virginia Woolf with dead bodies and car chases.

That you're Borges.' Manny laughed. 'Of course you are, you dumb shit. That's the whole point.

There are all these places in the world, he thought, all these pockets of existence, where nothing much ever changes. Tide pools.

Everything had gone so cheap and gaudy and hollow. Buy a table these days, what you got was an eighth of an inch of pine pressed onto plywood. Spent $1200 for a chair and you couldn't sit in the damn thing.

Back in med school we always said you have six chest tubes, six IVs, it's all over. You got to that point, all the rest's just dancing.

And the rest wasn't silence, like that opera, I Pagliacci, said. The rest was just noise.

Today he was driving an Impala and the sequence was: double-vehicle ram, bootlegger's turn, moonshiner's turn, sideswipe.