Roadwork

All places are the same unless your mind changes. There’s no magic place to get your mind right. If you feel like shit, everything you see looks like shit.

You can’t always understand something just because you did it.

I know something else as well: there’s a place in most of us where the rain is pretty much constant, the shadows are always long, and the woods are full of monsters.

Getting old is like driving through snow that just gets deeper and deeper. When you finally get in over your hubcaps, you just spin and spin. That’s life. There are no plows to come and dig you out. Your ship isn’t going to come in, girl. There are no boats for nobody. You’re never going to win a contest. There’s no camera following you and people watching you struggle. This is it. All of it. Everything.

Deep emotions had been excavated from his dry, middle-echelon executive’s soul like the relics of a dark religion from an archaeological dig. He knew what it was to be alive.

The fucking you got was never worth the screwing you took.

places are the same unless your mind changes. There’s no magic place to get your mind right. If you feel like shit, everything you see looks like shit. I know that.

Freddy, forty is the end of being young. Well, actually thirty's the end of being young forty is where you stop fooling yourself.

A woman's love is strange and cruel and nearly always clear-sighted, love that sees is always horrible love, and she knew walking away was right and so she walked, dismissing the cries as only another part of the boy's development, like smiles from gas or scraped knees.

All places are the same unless your mind changes. There's no magic place to get your mind right. If you feel like shit, everything you see looks like shit.

He swallowed, aware that his mind was broadcasting echoes of itself, helpless to stop, hypnotized by the grinding, Cyclopean eye of posterity.

Why did you go and do that? I served you faithfully and you broke me. I never harmed you and you smashed me. I was defenseless.

The world was round, that was the deadly truth of it.

He rolled and thrashed in his bed, waiting for the dancing blue shadows to come in his window, waiting for the heavy knock on his door, waiting for some bodiless, Kafkaesque voice to call: Okay, open up in there! And when he finally fell asleep he did it without knowing it, because thought continued without a break, shifting from conscious rumination to the skewed world of dreams with hardly a break, like a car going from drive to low. Even in his dreams he thought he was awake, and in his dreams he committed suicide over and over: burned himself; bludgeoned himself by standing under an anvil and pulling a rope; hanged himself; blew out the stove’s pilot lights and then turned on the oven and all four burners; shot himself; defenestrated himself; stepped in front of a moving Greyhound bus; swallowed pills; swallowed Vanish toilet bowl disinfectant; stuck a can of Glade Pine Fresh aerosol in his mouth, pushed the button, and inhaled until his head floated off into the sky like a child’s balloon; committed hara-kiri while kneeling in a confessional at St. Dom’s, confessing his self-murder to a dumbfounded young priest even as his guts accordioned out onto the bench like beef stew, performing an act of contrition in a fading, bemused voice as he lay in his blood and the steaming sausages of his intestines. But most vividly, over and over, he saw himself behind the wheel of the LTD, racing the engine a little in the closed garage, taking deep breaths and leafing through a copy of National Geographic, examining pictures of life in Tahiti and Aukland and the Mardi Gras in New Orleans, turning the pages ever more slowly, until the sound of the engine faded to a faraway sweet hum and the green waters of the South Pacific inundated him in rocking warmth and took him down to a silver fathom.

And if a collection of bad cells no bigger than a walnut could destroy all those things, those things that are so personal that they can never be properly articulated, so personal you hardly dared admit their existence to yourself, what did that leave? How could you trust life again? How could you see it as anything more meaningful than a Saturday night demolition derby?

It was always more frightening when the purported spy was a suburban WASP, one of us. KGB agents in Willamette or Des Moines,

Ich sehe das so: Ein Kerl, der stirbt, bevor Gott es für ihn vorgesehen hatte, erlebt so etwas wie ein Baseballspiel, das wegen Regen abgebrochen wird. Die Sünden, die er begangen hat, zählen nicht. Gott muss ihn einfach reinlassen, denn der Kerl hatte ja gar nicht mehr die Zeit zu bereuen, so wie Er es für ihn geplant hatte. Wenn ich also einen umbringe, erspare ich ihm dadurch die Qualen der Hölle. Auf diese Art tue ich sogar mehr für ihn, als der Papst selbst es je tun könnte.

Three other pieces of mail: An overdue notice from the library. Facing the Lions, by Tom Wicker. Wicker had spoken to a Rotary luncheon a month ago, and he was the best speaker they’d had in years.

The color on the new Zenith was more than good; it was nearly occult.