Stay Awake

A conclusion is simply the place where you got tired of thinking.

There is a stage you reach, Deagle thinks, a time somewhere in early middle age, when your past ceases to be about yourself. Your connection to your former life is like a dream or delirium, and that person who you once were is merely a fond acquaintance, or a beloved character from a storybook. This is how memory becomes nostalgia. They are two very different things - the same way that a person is different from a photograph of a person.

It had occurred to him that if the undead don't realize that they are dead, he might easily be one of them himself.

Here is the door of my mom's house, well-remembered childhood portal. Here is the yard, and a set of wires that runs from the house to a wooden pole, and some fat birds sitting together on the wires, five of them lined up like beads on an abacus.

I've been talking to myself a lot lately. I don't know what that's about, but my mother was the same way. She hated to make small talk with other people, but get her into a conversation with herself and she was quite the raconteur. She would tell herself a joke and clap her hands together as she let out a laugh; she would murmur to the plants as she watered them, and offer encouragement to the food as she cooked it. Sometimes I would walk into a room and surprise her as she was regaling herself with some delightful story, and I remember how the sound would dry up in her mouth. She stood there, frozen in the headlights of my teenage scorn.

It is not like a premonition of death. It is as if she died a long time ago, and she just now remembered it.

He had built his own future brick by brick around himself but there were no doors or windows, at least that was the way it seemed at the time he had thought to himself, I am locked in, it was like one of those ghost stories where you wake up and you are sealed in a coffin.

You really romanticize the white-trash period of your life,' Rain once said to me, which I thought was a little hurtful but perhaps true.

There is your car and the open road, the fabled lure of random adventure. You stand at the verge, and you could become anything. Your future shifts and warps with your smallest step, your shitty little whims. The man you will become is at your mercy.

Even when our death is imminent, we carry the image of ourselves moving forward, alive, into the future.

I guess I always thought it would be bigger, when a terrible thing happened. Didn't you think so? Doesn't it seem like houses ought to be caving in, and lightning and thunder, and people tearing their hair in the street? I never - I never thought it would be this small, did you?

This is one of those things that you can never explain to anyone; that's what I want to explain - one of those free-association moments with connections that dissolve when you start to try to put them into words.

The type of person who will always be your friend, for as long as you can stand to keep disappointing her.

You could say that they were sweet, or you could say that they were something out of a horror movie.

I guess," says Deagle, finally, "I'll just have a pack of Marlboro Lights. That's what I used to smoke when I was human.

There are a great number of what appear to be teenage runaways, but in Portland it seems that even the elderly dress as if they are teenage runaways, in hoodies and kerchiefs and ragged jeans, stinking of patchouli and dirty feet, and one tattooed old man even rolls by on a skateboard.

Fraj-ile," I say, pronouncing it the way she does - as if it might be a popular tourist destination in the Pacific, beautiful Fraj Isle, with its white sandy beaches and shark-filled coves.

You want a child because it is a link in the bridge that you are building between the past and the future, a cantilever that holds you, so that you are not alone.

There are little wisps of jelly in a living brain. Deagle knows this well: neurons, transmitting signals - and the soul, so to speak, is somewhere in those flashes. He heard once on a science program that the spindle cell - present in humans, whales, some apes, elephants - may be at the heart of what we call our "selves." What we recognize in the mirror - that thread we follow through time that we call "me"? It's just a diatom, a paramecium, a bit of ganglia that branches and shudders assertively. A brief brain orgasm, like lightning. In short, it's all chemicals. You can regiment it easily enough: fluoxetine, sertraline, paroxetine, escitalopram, citalopram - the brain can be washed clean, and you can reset yourself, Ctrl+Alt+Del. You don't have to be a prisoner of your memories and emotions.

Outside, the sleet had gotten thicker. You could hear it pebbling against the large glass windows, you could see it swirling wildly through the spotlights of street lamps. It was the kind of night when you might expect to see a skeleton flying through the air, its ragged black shroud flapping in the wind.

The two of you stood there, side by side, and the tectonic plates of your lives began to shift and resettle, continents separating.

I should be arguing vehemently with doctors, demanding results, I should be surrounded by people who are bleeding and screaming and shocking one another with defibrillators.

Hesitantly, I touched the stump where my finger used to be. In my mind, something almost remembered itself, but the fumes of turpentine were making me a little lightheaded; whatever memory was on the verge of coughing itself up was gone even before it materialized. Out the window, I could see a squirrel was stumbling erratically around in circles underneath the old basketball net. Then I realized that it wasn't a squirrel; it was a brown paper bag.

How good it felt to be alone, stacking blocks. That's what came to him again, a kind of weight solidifying in his chest: how much he had loved to be alone - to be outside of his own life, a giant, sentient cloud looming over his imaginary city, hovering above it. There was a certain kind of blank omniscience that felt like his true self, at last.

The desire to remake that shrinking expanse of life they were still allotted, to make use of it, to fill it up with possibility. Oh please: one more transformation.

Let us say that this, all of this, has a logic to it. We understand each other, don't we? Are we not, you and I, both of us spirits? Reader, do not ask me who at this very moment is dreaming you. Do not ask me when you are going to die. Do not ask me where the gold is buried.

In the basement of Sydney's new house is a little room that is about the size and shape of a coffin.

He pictures amputated human arms flopping like fish down the center of the road; syringes floating on beds of liposuctioned fat; gelatinous human eyeballs wiggling merrily as they roll down the highway; and so on. He could imagine other such grotesque stuff, but chooses not to.

Beth had been a middle school science teacher and Joni was a librarian and they both had collections of weird stuff they had found. Bizarre, misspelled letters written by lovelorn eighth graders. Obscene Polaroids left in between the pages of library books. They used to call each other on the phone to share their latest discovery, and Critter had always remained a little off to the side, never feeling quite as sharp or ironic as they were. Critter was an electrician, primarily home repair, and so he didn't usually come across anything except bad wiring and faulty lighting fixtures.

When Beth was killed, she was reading. It was around four on a Thursday afternoon, school was done and she was on her way to pick up Hazel at day care, hurrying down the sidewalk toward the bus stop. Walking and reading, which he always warned her about, her feet moving automatically beneath her as she flipped through a stack of quizzes that her students had taken in preparation for their sixth grade proficiency test. What