The Supernatural Enhancements

A.: Whatever; you must know how it works. An artifact containing... raw feelings, unprocessed sights and sounds and pains that the brain interprets- is that too crazy? DR. BELKNAP: No. It has existed for thousands of years. It's called a book.

All those pathetic lonely people fooling one another into their clumsy games of afterlife and cosmic relevance just to avoid noticing the nauseating sadness of their real lives.

And the sad truth is, I want to be all those people. I’d sooner die forked a thousand times in that house than wake up to a world without monsters or goddesses. I’d rather play the monster myself.

The dead cannot give orders; they can only whisper.

This silence here was somewhat heavier, lonelier than the preceding one. The former was an elevator silence; this one was a walking-through-the-woods-by-night silence.

This was different. It had synths droning and sending saltwater waves under my feet. It had drumbeats bursting like fireworks, rumbling the furniture out of place, and then a crazy, irregular, disharmonious, spiral crescendo of pure electric noise, like a typhoon dragging our bodies into it. It featured brass orchestras and choirs of mermaids and a piano in Iceland, all of them right there, visible, touchable, in Axton House. It shook us, fucked us, suspended us far above the reach of Help bouncing on his hind legs. It spoke of magenta sunsets and plastic patio chairs growing moss under summer storms rolling on caterpillar tracks. It sprinkled a bokeh of car lights rushing through night highways and slapped our faces like the wind at a hundred and twenty miles an hour. It pictured Niamh playing guitar, washed up naked on a beach in Fiji.

I did not hesitate to quit my courses and leave my apartment, feeling as detached from everything as only at twenty-three one feels, when all is temporary and settling down means to stagnate

But I can’t believe. The older I get, the more solid the wall becomes, like everything that was to be explored has already been. True things grow truer, and unproved things fade away. Because we don’t need them. Like I don’t need a god.

I long for the slightest evidence of it that doesn’t require me to relinquish reason, because a natural mystery and reason to face it make the happiest combination of all.

There is warmth in Niamh sitting by the fire, chin propped on her knees, cheeks ripening like peaches, brittle body inside an undershirt in a T-shirt in a flannel shirt in a cardigan, slowly peeling off layers as the heat sinks in, and you always wish to be somewhere there, between two layers, never the core, but close.

Their perception, however, may still be triggered by the presence of aesthetic conditioners or topoi, from whose influence virtually nobody is free. For instance, an old, desolated castle predisposes the visitor to be aware of moving shadows.

They were feared in the short range, hated from a distance.

Those who believe in the soul fear theirs might burn in hell. Those who believe in ghosts fear they will be haunted. Those who believe we’re not alone end up glancing over their shoulders at all times and despising their unreliable senses.

like time is running faster than me, and I have to catch up.