One of Us

There are times when life seems like a struggle where the only reward you get for hanging on is the chance to struggle some more.

If people knew that I really am what I say I am,' he said, 'you know they'd never forgive me.' 'Don't worry,' I said, 'Your lack of a secret is safe with us.

I guess, like some guy once said, if triangles invented a god, the chances are high it would have three sides.

Everything feels like a badly designed computer game in which you fall into a pit that doesn't kill you but from which there's absolutely no escape. For a while you kick against the walls, but the walls get higher no matter how hard and fast you press all the buttons you can find. And sooner or later you'll realize there's one you haven't tried yet. The power switch.[...] So she began reaching for the button herself, but she never tried quite hard enough, because some part of her was still alive. She didn't want to throw the machine away. She just wanted to start again.

Cross-legged on the floor, you drink, hoping each mouthful will hurt; occasional flurries of spastic movement as you try to work out what to do with your hands. When everyone else is gone, your world is just a tiny box with the walls pressing in. Messages on the phone you can't bear to play, much less listen to, and nothing in the apartment that you can recognize as meaningfully yours.

I was sixteen back then, and I was going to a party with my girlfriend and Earl. Earl was driving, and his new squeeze was in the passenger seat. I was in the back, holding hands with mine. That was such a big thing at that age, clasping the hand of someone you loved. A heady declaration, the closing of a circuit, the joining of two souls. When you get older you don't seem to do it so much. Your hands are generally busy with other things, and every relationship goes through an accelerated evolution. Everyone you meet has an apartment, and either self-confidence or a desperate lack of it: Either tends to make you rush through the hand-holding stage. Sure, you may do it later, but it's not the same. It's like eating your appetizer after your dessert. When you're a grown-up, the only time you get to trace slowly through that delicious progression is when you're having an affair, which I guess is why so many people have affairs. A trip back in time, to when everything had weight, through the medium of unfaithfulness.

The angel we named God banned representations of himself, even the writing of his name, trying to halt the process of literalization—but in the end it became inevitable. The angel found himself at the head of a corporation, run by Young Turks who wouldn't respect the line management structure: They rewrote his memos to make the law more rigorous, more confined, more human. He got ousted in a boardroom coup and kicked upstairs. He hadn't realized the power of corporeality, that the minds of men would of necessity alter the mind of their God. Being a deity meant taking on a lot of your subjects' qualities—both profound and trivial.

I have a way of dealing with temptation. I just succumb and get it over with.

Wherever you go, and whatever you do, the first thing you're going to see in the morning, and the last thing at night, is the inside of your own head. An unchanging landscape, a still photograph.