The Beginning Place

His alarm clock ticked by the head of the bed. He gazed at its whitish face, the hands both drawing downward. There were no clocks, there. There were no hours. It was not the river of time flowing that moved the clock's hands forward; their mechanism moved them. Seeing them move men said, Time is passing, passing, but they were fooled by the clocks they made. It is we who pass through time, Hugh thought.

was there, and he could come back to it, the silence that gave words meaning, the center that gave the world a shape.

You never think of going on past the dragon, Irena thought. You only think about getting to it. But what happens afterwards?… I have passed the place of the dragon and I can't go back. I have to go on. It was my home, the light in the window, the fire on the hearth, I was a child there, I was the daughter, but it's gone. Now I'm only the dragon's daughter and the king's child, the one that has to go alone, go on, because there is no home behind me.

Lord Horn [...] paused, looking down at her as if from a distance, from a tower several miles off, with bleared windows through which it was hard to see clearly.

It was being alone here that was the joy of it. Being alone, not having to try to handle other people, their needs, demands, commands.

He got into a good swinging pace and after ten or twelve blocks had walked free of the grip of his mother's mood.

When he came to wash up at the sink he found her saucer chipped and the handle broken off the coffee cup. The small violence made his stomach turn over.

crazies like the shoplifter who tried to bribe his way out or the guy who pulled a knife on Donna when she refused to cash his check without ID; and people doing things that might have a reason but looked pretty weird, such as buying forty-eight bottles of germkiller spray and a can of water chestnuts. What all these people had in common, as well as he could figure it out, was a kind of getting out of gear, out of synch. The engine made a noise but no power got to the wheels. They were stuck. They got nowhere.