“I sometimes wonder, would you be able to reconstruct some image of me through the objects I’ve left behind? Would you know what I looked like? Smelled like? How I acted in public and in private?”
“It all stopped, very suddenly, for Robert Bailey, just before his 31st birthday. One moment he was thinking, remembering things, talking silently and invisibly in his head—in other words, he was altogether active, interiorly speaking, and then it stopped.”
“But then the Romans didn’t want paunchy, lumpy bodies in their villas (aside from their own), so they decapitated Sokrates, already green and moldy from the hemlock, and shoved his face alone in their alcoves, dressing him up in pure white marble.”
“We always did the same things every day: we went into the toy store and rearranged all the Rubik’s Cubes. We went into the library and looked at the medical encyclopedias or biographies of old ugly white guys in wigs.”
The first stone was one I knew. Flaking and grey and dusty. A driveway stone – from my driveway. Who breaks a person’s dining room window with a stone from that same person’s driveway?
“The very first thing he felt was a dulled twinge of fear that breathing seemed to take so much exceptional effort, but even that was killed off very quickly.”
