The Invention of Sound

We are each our own best effort. And we’re satisfied until we see a photograph or hear a recording of our voice. All the worse is the torture of video, to witness the squawking, gawky monster we’ve created. The you that you’ve chosen from all possible yous to create. The one life you’ve been given, and you’ve dedicated it to perfecting this staggering yammering artificial Frankenstein’s monster stitched together from the traits of other people. Anything original, anything innately you, it’s long ago been discarded.

Our greatest creation is our selves. The way we cultivate our appearance and behavior. And nowhere is our artwork more apparent than in our own minds. They way we each have an idea of self. The one perfect self we've chosen by rejecting all other options.

The deal with dating conceited men like him was that she'd hoped some of his excess self-esteem would rub off. Women always secretly hoped this: that dating a narcissist would give them confidence by osmosis. It never worked.

Lucy never bought the reason for trimming the pot roast,” he recounted. Her mother had offered other reasonable explanations. The smaller end tended to be too fatty, for example. The bit they trimmed away always served up too bitter or too tough. Whatever the case, her mother had reasoned, this was how she’d been taught by her mother, Lucinda’s grandmother, so this was how she meant to teach her own daughter. “And still”—Foster shrugged and offered up both hands helplessly—“Lucinda insisted they call her grandmother and keep asking.” So they’d called Lucinda’s grandmother. A woman dead of cancer for three years now. And they’d asked why it was so important to trim the smaller end off the pot roast. Here he wound up to deliver the story’s payoff. “It wasn’t because the meat cooked unevenly or dried out,” he said. “It was because the only roasting pan they’d had—so long ago—had only been so-big.” A lesson in perpetuating a mistake across generations. A dozen valid reasons, all wrong.

It was hard not to love a man who so steadfastly ignored the awful truth about her. But it was even more difficult to respect him.

Every evening was a choice between reading a classic book or going out to an industry event. In brief: whether to spend her time with smart dead people or alive idiots.

Yawning and laughter,” she went on to explain, “are contagious because they were the protohuman’s method for regulating the mood of their group or tribe.

He’d made nothing of his life, so the best he could imagine was to conceive another of himself. A do-over: Jimmy 2.0. As if to give himself a second shot, and doing so would shift the burden to this new him and give the current Jimmy permission to squander what was left of his years.

Haunting her was the idea that we each summon our own death.

Since the dawn of films when young women had been tied to railroad tracks and tied to logs sent into hug sawmill blades, Hollywood ha never lacked new ways to take pretty girls apart.

Brainless wasn't bad. Today, brainless was right up her alley. This world of grunts and clanking iron, the same tasks repeated mindlessly until failure, Mitzi loved it the moment she'd stepped through the door of the weight room. The Sisyphean repetition of lifting and lowering. Nothing represented life better than this endless losing battle against gravity. The grunts and cries that conveyed so much more than words ever could.

Jimmy's skin smelled like paint. So much so that when she'd wrap her hand around his dick and jerk it up and down – like shaking a can of spray paint – she'd half expect to hear something rattle inside.

Her body continued to be the black box of a jetliner that had crashed with no survivors.

The past lived on in her hands, the way they'd shaken when Mitzi took her first DAT into a pitch. The memory lived as pain in her scalp, the old tug of her hair. She'd such long hair back then. High school-long hair, she'd pulled it tight, knotting it into a French braid she'd pinned down. Her French braid pinned to the back of her head, pinned as cruelly as any butterfly or scarab beetle pinned to the board in freshman-year Biology of Insects.

...[T]he only way a person had to process an experience so troubling was by sharing it.

Taco Tuesday. Only in prisons and aboard submarines were people more excited about food than they were in office jobs.

An orange-stained Los Angelina she wasn't. Not yet another bimbo beat hard with a blonde stick.

Stabbing, Mitzi could write a book about. For example, why some killers kept stabbing for so long. Only the first thrust is intended to inflict pain. The subsequent twenty, thirty, forty stab wounds are to resolve the suffering.

From his research he knew that child traffickers walk amongst us. They stand beside us at the bank. They sit next to us in restaurants. Foster had scarcely had to scratch the surface of the web before such predators had glommed onto him, sending their corruption and trying to rope him into their sickening world.

My job,” Mitzi said, “is to make everyone in the whole world scream at the exact same time.