fiefoe

Peter Turchin

I hope that this book will convince you that this view is wrong. A science of history is not only possible but also useful: it helps us anticipate how the collective choices we make in the present can bring us a better future.
* focused on cycles of political integration and disintegration, particularly on state formation and state collapse. This is the area where our field’s findings are arguably the most robust—and arguably the most disturbing... complex societies everywhere are affected by recurrent and, to a certain degree, predictable waves of political instability, brought about by the same basic set of forces, operating across the thousands of years of human history.
we were due for another sharp instability spike by the early 2020s.
* stagnating or declining real wages (wages in inflation-adjusted dollars), a growing gap between rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, declining public trust, and exploding public debt, these seemingly disparate social indicators are actually related to each other dynamically. Historically, such developments have served as leading indicators of looming political instability. In the United States, all of these factors started to take an ominous turn in the 1970s.
The problem is that the historical record is rich, and each pundit can easily find cases in it to support whichever side of a policy debate they favor. Clearly, inference from such “cherry-picked” examples is not the way to go. <> Cliodynamics is different. It uses the methods of data science, treating the historical record, compiled by generations of historians, as Big Data.
the New Deal era: for roughly fifty years the interests of workers and the interests of owners were kept in balance in this country, such that overall income inequality remained remarkably low. <> This social contract began to break down in the late 1970s... the fruits of economic growth were reaped by the elites. A perverse “wealth pump” came into being, taking from the poor and giving to the rich. The Great Compression reversed itself. In many ways, the past forty years resemble what happened in the United States between 1870 and 1900.
* the extra wealth flowing to the elites (to the proverbial “1 percent,” but even more so to the top 0.01 percent) eventually created trouble for the wealth holders (and power holders) themselves. The social pyramid has grown top-heavy. We now have too many “elite aspirants” competing for a fixed number of positions in the upper echelons of politics and business. In our model, such conditions have a name: elite overproduction. Together with popular immiseration, elite overproduction, and the intraelite conflicts that it has engendered, has gradually undermined our civic cohesiveness
Ten-percenters (roughly, millionaires in today’s dollars) have a lot of power over their own lives. One-percenters (roughly, decamillionaires) have a lot of power over other people’s lives. Centimillionaires and billionaires wield even more power.
Then a chair is removed, and another round is played. At the end, there is one winner. In Evita, the winner is Colonel Juan Perón, who later in the musical (as in real life) becomes president of Argentina and founder of the Peronist Party. <> In the elite aspirant game, or the aspirant game, for short, instead of reducing the number of chairs each round, we increase the number of players... For example, you can slow down by a chair or even stop and wait right next to it for the music to stop, while shoving away other contenders. Congratulations, you have just become a counter-elite—someone who is willing to break the rules to get ahead in the game. Unfortunately, others quickly catch on, and each chair soon acquires a jostling crowd, and before long you have the recipe for a free-for-all fistfight. This turns out to be a good model for understanding the consequences of elite overproduction in real life.
An even better metric for following the effect of overproduction of wealth holders on elections is the cost of running a successful campaign... the average spending of the House winner increased from $400K in 1990 to $2.35 million in 2020, while the same statistic for the Senate started at $3.9 million (in 1990) and grew to $27 million in the last electoral round.
* An additional sign of growing popular discontent was the rise of populist parties, such as the anti-immigration Know-Nothing Party. <> Another related factor in Lincoln’s rise, and the Civil War that his election triggered, was elite overproduction. After 1820, most of the gains from the growing economy went not to the workers but to the elites;... The new millionaires chafed under the rule of the Southern aristocracy, as their economic interests diverged from the established elites. The new elites, who made their money in manufacturing, favored high tariffs to protect budding American industries and state support for “internal improvements” (turnpike, canal, and railroad construction)... History textbooks tell us that the American Civil War was fought over slavery, but this is not the whole story. A better way to characterize this conflict is to say that it was fought over “slavocracy.”
Taiping: Popular immiseration together with elite overproduction is an explosive combination. Immiserated masses generate raw energy, while a cadre of counter-elites provides an organization to channel that energy against the ruling class.
the crisis severity is variable. Despite this variability, the time of troubles always comes. So far, we haven’t seen an exception to this rule. No society that my team has studied had an integrative phase lasting more than around two hundred years.
* Our analysis points to four structural drivers of instability: popular immiseration leading to mass mobilization potential; elite overproduction resulting in intraelite conflict; failing fiscal health and weakened legitimacy of the state; and geopolitical factors. The most important driver is intraelite competition and conflict, which is a reliable predictor of the looming crisis.
Toward 1300, however, the brilliance of the French kingdom began to tarnish. The golden age turned into a gilded age. While elite opulence continued unabated, the living conditions of common people deteriorated. The root cause of popular immiseration was the massive population boom in Western Europe in the two centuries before 1300... the demographic catastrophe had another, more subtle but nevertheless devastating effect on social stability by making the social pyramid unsustainably top-heavy. After 1250, the number of nobles increased even faster than that of the general population.. In other words, massive overpopulation during the thirteenth century created a wealth pump that enriched landowners at the expense of peasants.
Again, we find that cycles of collective violence tend to recur during the disintegrative phases, with a roughly fifty-year periodicity. The Late Medieval Crisis in France was not an exception. <> As the new generation of leaders replaced the one that had firsthand experience of the state collapse in the 1350s, they repeated the mistakes of their elders. Two aristocratic factions, the Burgundians and the Orleanists, battled for the capital, massacring each other in turn.. in 1415 another English king, Henry V, entered the fray. History repeated itself with a catastrophic defeat of the French army at Agincourt, which was a close replay of the Battle of Crécy. It is eerie how closely the second collapse of the French state followed the trajectory of the first.
At the same time, the memory of the dark period of social breakdown and the external pressure from the English forged a new feeling of national unity among the elites. In this new climate of intraelite cooperation, it proved to be possible to reform state finances and provide France with a solid fiscal foundation for generations ahead.
Historians of China see a similar pattern, which they call the dynastic cycles. Between 221 BC and 1912, from the Qin dynasty to the Qing dynasty, China was repeatedly unified (and reunified) and governed effectively for a while. Then moral corruption set in, bringing decline and fragmentation. As the Chinese historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms says, “The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.” Historians of ancient Egypt also divide its history into the Old Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom, and the New Kingdom, each followed by the First, Second, and Third Intermediate Periods.
When France broke down in the 1350s, all the English surplus elites—and there were huge numbers of them in England, just as in France—followed their king across the Channel. Some of them were killed in the fighting, but the majority found that the French wars were an exceedingly lucrative business... In other words, England exported its surplus elites—and instability—to France.
When France broke down again in the early fifteenth century and another English king entered the fray in 1415, the hordes of impoverished elites flowed back across the Channel after him... It’s like societies have a cultural stencil plate for state collapse—the French way or the English way, as the case may be. England’s trajectory after 1415 was another example of this curious pattern. As before, things went well for the English—for a while. Instability was successfully exported to France, and there were no significant disturbances in England between 1415 and 1448. However, as the French successfully reconquered their country around 1450, increasing numbers of English surplus elites had to return home. The current king, Henry VI, was unfit to rule, and the Royal Council governed in his name. The leadership of the Lancastrian faction fell to Margaret of Anjou...And in 1455, the Wars of the Roses broke out,
During the integrative phase, every other generation saw a baronial rebellion against the crown, but compared to the Wars of the Roses, those rebellions were more like armed demonstrations intended to impress baronial demands on the king. The rebellion of 1215–1217, for example, was resolved by the king signing the Magna Carta to satisfy the mutinous elites. In the Wars of the Roses, the goal of each side was the extermination of the enemy.
* In England we have a useful quantitative proxy to trace this trend, because drinking wine (rather than ale) was one marker of elite status. At the peak of their fortunes, English elites imported and consumed twenty thousand tuns of wine from Gascony. By the end of the Wars of the Roses, fewer than five thousand tuns were imported, and wine imports did not start recovering until after 1490. The implied fourfold decline in English elite numbers parallels the estimated fourfold decrease in the French nobility by the end of their own age of discord.
the Age of Revolutions arrived in England in 1830, while in France, of course, it was kicked off by the Storming of the Bastille in 1789. In short, France and England behaved like two dangling weights, swinging back and forth within the same period but one lagging behind the other.
* Extensive polygamy, the practice of marrying many spouses, was also the rule for steppe pastoralists, such as the Mongols. As a result, these societies churned out elite aspirants at a frightening rate. The faster the pace at which elite overproduction develops, the shorter the integrative phases.
Take the General Crisis of the seventeenth century, which was Eurasia-wide. Why did the English Civil War, the Time of Troubles in Russia, and the collapse of the Ming dynasty in China happen at roughly the same time?... The Great Famine coincided with a trough in solar activity known as the Wolf Minimum (1280–1350). Most climatologists agree that lower solar activity produces cooler global temperatures... In my view, external forcing due to climate fluctuations is not a direct cause of social breakdown. Its effect is more subtle. Here’s where metronomes swinging in odd sympathy can help... The second synchronizing force, contagion, is even more potent than external forcing. Cliodynamic analysis indicates that major epidemics
Rural unemployment coupled with urban demand for labor (in crafts and trades but also as servants for the wealthy) generates a population flow toward the cities, which grow much faster than the general population during this period. The elite demand for luxury goods drives long-distance trade. <> These trends make the appearance of new diseases and the spread of existing ones more likely... As a result, societies that are approaching a crisis are very likely to be hit by an epidemic. But the causality also flows in the opposite direction. A major epidemic undermines societal stability. Because the poor suffer greater mortality than the elites,
Before the Arab Spring of 2010, there was the Springtime of Nations in 1848. It started in Italy in January but was little noticed at the time. The most influential event was the February Revolution in France, which inspired uprisings in Germany, Denmark, and Sweden in March.
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The distinguished economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton recently used these statistics to discover a highly troubling trend in this measure of well-being. They found that life expectancy at birth for white Americans fell by one-tenth of a year between 2013 and 2014. In the next three years, life expectancy fell for the US population as a whole. Mortality at all ages rose, but the most rapid increase happened to white Americans in midlife.
* In the 1970s, a new generation of elites began replacing the “great civic generation.”[27] The new elites, who didn’t experience the turbulence of the previous age of discord, forgot its lessons and started to gradually dismantle the pillars on which the postwar prosperity era was based. The ideas of neoclassical economics, previously held by fringe economists, now became mainstream.[28] The Reagan presidency of the 1980s was the turning point when the idea of cooperation between workers and businesses was abandoned.
Recent new papers by economists provide strong evidence for the importance of nonmarket forces in explaining the wage declines of American workers... wage suppression between 1979 and 2017 was due to a shifting balance of power, not to automation and technological changes. 1. Austerity macroeconomics, including facilitating unemployment higher than it needed to be to keep inflation in check, and responding to recessions with insufficient force; 2. Corporate-driven globalization, ...
By 2016, then, the American population had sorted itself out into two social classes: the educated and the “immiserated”
Today an advanced degree is not a perfect, or even reasonably effective, defense against precarity.
History (and CrisisDB) tells us that the credentialed precariat (or, in the jargon of cliodynamics, the frustrated elite aspirant class) is the most dangerous class for societal stability. Overproduction of youth with advanced degrees has been the most significant factor in driving societal upheavals, from the Revolutions of 1848 to the Arab Spring of 2011. Interestingly, different professions have different propensities for producing revolutionary leaders. You might not think of a teacher as a likely revolutionary,... The most dangerous occupation, however, appears to be the legal profession. Robespierre, Lenin, and Castro were lawyers. So were Lincoln and Gandhi
The problem is that in today’s climate, when ideology has been “weaponized” by rival elite factions, any discussion of it is like entering a minefield. A more conceptual difficulty in studying the role of ideology in societal breakdown is that the cognitive content of ideologies espoused by rival elite factions is highly variable over time and between different parts of the world. During the European civil wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the defining feature of ideological battles was religion, as, for example, Huguenots versus Catholics in the French Wars of Religion.
A nearly universal feature of precrisis periods is thus the fragmentation of the ideological landscape and the breakdown of elite ideological consensus that underlies routine acceptance of state institutions.
although the US was an avowed capitalist country (and repressed the Communist Party), in practice it was a social democratic or even socialist country along the lines of the Nordic model. The Postwar Consensus included... A low-immigration regime
* those on the right gain a signal advantage once they graduate. This advantage is their capacity to mobilize support among the working-class (less educated) voters. A common situation during crisis periods is that of elite political entrepreneurs who use the high mass mobilization potential of the non-elite population to advance their ideological agendas and political careers. A great historical example is Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, who founded the populist party (populares in Latin) in late republican Rome.
As of 2022, we are clearly in transition from the precrisis phase, when the state is still struggling to maintain control of the ideological landscape in the face of a multitude of counter-elite challengers, to the next phase, when numerous contenders struggle among themselves for primacy... Many observers were taken aback by the intensity of the “cancel culture” that appeared seemingly out of nowhere. But such vicious ideological struggles are a common phase in any revolution.
In order for stability to return, elite overproduction somehow needs to be taken care of—historically and typically by eliminating the surplus elites through massacre, imprisonment, emigration, or forced or voluntary downward social mobility. In America today, the losers are treated in milder ways, at least so far.
* Early states were usually governed by militocracies, whose main source of social power was simply force.
Understanding this, early warrior elites sought to control ideological power by appointing themselves as priests, or by thoroughly controlling religion specialists. Many early states were ruled by priest-kings, or even by god-kings. Egyptian pharaohs, for example, were worshipped as gods. The rulers of early states also added economic power to the mix. Because the main means of production in preindustrial societies was land—for growing food and fiber and for raising livestock—they set themselves up as landowners... But once you have a million or more subjects, you either acquire a civil service or suffer from such inefficiencies that your polity sooner or later collapses.
the Mamluks maintained their grip on Egypt for nearly three centuries. They accomplished this feat by forbidding the sons of Mamluks to inherit their fathers’ positions. Instead, they continued to purchase boys originating from Central Asia and the Caucasus on the slave market and train them as soldiers, officers, and ultimately rulers. Whether intentionally or not, avoiding elite overproduction made the Mamluk regime particularly stable. To give you an idea of how effective the Mamluks were, consider that they were the only military force that managed to stop the Mongols.. Unfortunately for the Mamluks, they failed to modernize their army. Their cavalry was excellent, but they lagged in adopting gunpowder weapons. As a result, in 1517, Egypt was conquered by the nearest “gunpowder empire”—the Ottomans.
the general pattern. From the twelfth century, Egypt was ruled by a succession of military elites. As soon as the ruling elite lost its control of military power, it was replaced by another set of warriors... (Arab Spring) Had Gamal succeeded his father as ruler of Egypt, it would have amounted to a social revolution in which the old military elites were replaced by the new economic elites... When the army overthrew Morsi, the economic elites returned to the army-business coalition as a junior partner. The end result of the 2011–2014 crisis was that Egypt returned to a traditional—for it, at least—power configuration,
* China. Unlike Egypt (and the USA), for more than two millennia, China has been governed by elites for whom the primary source of power is administrative. In other words, by bureaucracies. China’s ruling class was recruited through an elaborate system of local and imperial examinations.
Plutocracies have also been rare in history. Well-known historical examples include such Italian merchant republics as Venice and Genoa, as well as the Dutch Republic. Today the best example of a plutocracy is the United States of America.
* An influential school of historical thought views the Civil War and its aftermath, Reconstruction, as the Second American Revolution, albeit an unfinished one. Although the Civil War freed the slaves, it utterly failed to produce racial equality. The main effect was thus the revolution at the top: the turnover of the elites... at the same time that the Civil War destroyed Southern wealth, it immensely enriched Northern capitalists. Supplying the Union war effort was even more profitable. “A surprising number of the commercial and financial giants of the late nineteenth century—J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould, Marshall Field, Philip Armour, Collis Huntington, and several other railroad grandees—were young Northerners who avoided military service, usually by buying substitutes, and used the war to take major steps up future fortune’s ladder,”
We can see this economic transformation reflected in the makeup of the Lincoln administration. This aspect of Lincoln’s career is not widely emphasized, but he practiced a lot of corporate law,.. Many members of his administration had strong railroad or financial ties.
Toward the end of the Gilded Age, the idea that unrestricted competition was injurious to all players became expressed more and more frequently by business leaders, including such titans as John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan.[13] Their dislike of the resulting disorder and their pursuit of predictability resulted in the Great Merger Movement of 1895–1904. In most cases, these turn-of-the-century combinations were economically less efficient than the new rivals that appeared almost immediately. Their main benefits, however, were not in increasing economic efficiency but in increasing the political power of business.
Another important development, which took place later (around 1920), was the coalescence of what the political scientist G. William Domhoff calls the “policy-planning network,”.. The bulk of the money came from just three members of the economic elite: the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, the oil baron John D. Rockefeller, and a wealthy St. Louis merchant, Robert Brookings.
Simply put, at the top of the power pyramid in America is the corporate community:
* nearly two thousand policy issues between 1981 and 2002... Statistical analysis of this remarkable data set showed that the preferences of the poor had no effect on policy changes. This is not entirely unexpected. What is surprising is that there was no—zilch, nada—effect of the average voter.
Another consideration is that this analysis addressed only what political scientists call the “first face of power”: the ability of citizens to shape policy outcomes on contested issues. But the “second face of power,” shaping the agenda of issues that policy makers consider, is a subtle but extremely powerful way for the elites to get their way. Finally, the “third face of power” is the ability of ideological elites to shape the preferences of the public... My favorite example of its effectiveness is the “death tax” meme
* There is E-Verify, a Department of Homeland Security website that allows businesses to determine the work statuses of potential employees, but no federal mandate requires employers to use it... Yet one has to wonder when a solution that involves spending billions of dollars on border security and detention of migrants is implemented—with imperfect results, to say the least—but a solution that involves cutting off the money that draws migrants to this country in the first place has never been adopted. Cui bono, as the Romans used to say.
it is easy to see why the Left wants to defend illegal migrants against being targeted and victimized. And it should. But acting on the correct moral impulse to defend the human dignity of migrants, the Left has ended up pulling the front line too far back, effectively defending the exploitative system of migration itself.
* My statistical analysis of long-term data trends indicates that immigration has been a significant contributor to the stagnation/decline of wages in the United States over the past several decades, particularly for workers without college educations... There is a reason why the greatest surge of immigration in American history in the late nineteenth century coincided with the first Gilded Age, the period of extreme income inequality and popular immiseration comparable only to our own... There is a reason why the greatest surge of immigration in American history in the late nineteenth century coincided with the first Gilded Age, the period of extreme income inequality and popular immiseration comparable only to our own.
There is no getting around the fact that the power of unions relies by definition on their ability to restrict and withdraw the supply of labor, which becomes impossible if an entire workforce can be easily and cheaply replaced. Open borders and mass immigration are a victory for the bosses.
* Today’s well-intentioned activists have become the useful idiots of big business. With their adoption of “open borders” advocacy—and a fierce moral absolutism that regards any limit to migration as an unspeakable evil—any criticism of the exploitative system of mass migration is effectively dismissed as blasphemy.
During the next four centuries, this geopolitical landscape was utterly reshaped. First, the total number of states in Europe was drastically cut down, from more than five hundred to just about thirty. Second, most of the plutocracies went extinct and were swallowed up by militocracies. The reason? Three words: the Military Revolution.
The early American Republic was an oligarchy modeled after the United Kingdom, although without a monarch (who, by that point, was on the way to becoming just a figurehead in the British Empire anyway). As a result, the United States inherited plutocracy as part of its “cultural genotype.”
it took sixty years for Danish social democrats to transition from counter-elites to established elites... In 1933, Stauning negotiated the Kanslergade Agreement, which laid down the foundations of what became known as the Nordic model. The key feature of the Nordic model is tripartite cooperation between labor, business, and government, working together for the common good.
* the Democratic Party of the FDR period can be thought of as a party of the working class, we must add an important qualification. It was a party of the white working class. In order to push his agenda through, FDR had to make a devil’s bargain with the Southern elites, which essentially made the South immune from the tripartite bargain among workers, business, and government that the FDR administration forged. In particular, the segregationist regime in the South was left untouched. Black workers, especially in the South, were excluded from the social contract of the New Deal.
Heather Cox Richardson writes in How the South Won the Civil War: So the original American paradox of freedom based on inequality was reestablished. That restoration relegated people of color to inequality, but it also undercut the ability of oligarchs to destroy democracy. Black and brown people were subordinate, so wealthy men could not convincingly argue that they were commandeering government to redistribute wealth and destroy liberty. With that rhetoric defanged, white Americans used the government to curb wealth and power.
The gradual expansion of the social contract to include Black workers, however, provided an opening for those plutocrats who were unhappy with America as a quasi-Nordic country in which their power was constrained by the other two interest groups: workers and the state. They used the Republican Party as a vehicle to push their own agenda... the “Southern strategy,” whose goal was to make the Republican Party the dominant party in the former Confederate states by appealing to Southern white voters using explicitly or implicitly racist issues.
King : And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, (Yes, sir) he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man.
* The worst incident in US labor history was the Battle of Blair Mountain (1921). Although it started as a labor dispute, it eventually turned into the largest armed insurrection in US history, other than the Civil War. Between ten thousand and fifteen thousand miners armed with rifles fought thousands of strikebreakers and sheriff’s deputies, called the Logan Defenders.
A key development in shutting down the wealth pump was the passage of the immigration laws of 1921 and 1924... Shutting down immigration reduced the labor supply and provided a powerful boost to real wages for many decades to come.
The prosocial policies during the Progressive and New Deal periods had to be paid for—and the costs were borne by the American ruling class. It is little appreciated just how much the economic elites had to give up to make it work. Between 1929 and the 1970s, top fortunes declined not only in relative terms (in comparison with median wealth) but also in absolute terms
The top wealth, then, was equivalent to the annual wages of twenty-five thousand workers. By 1912, when this indicator reached its first peak... It was equivalent to 2.6 million annual wages—two orders of magnitude (x100) greater! By 1982, when inflation had eroded the dollar even more, the richest American was Daniel Ludwig, whose $2 billion was equivalent to “only” ninety-three thousand annual wages.[14] <> This reversal of elite overproduction was similar in magnitude to the one that occurred in the aftermath of the Civil War,
Savva Morozov, one of the wealthiest industrialists in prerevolutionary Russia,[18] also couldn’t envision such a disastrous outcome. He was a noted philanthropist and patron of the arts... In a final ironic twist, her opulent country estate, Gorki (The Hills), became the main residence of the leader of the proletarian revolution, Vladimir Lenin.
Nero realized that it was time to end his life, but fleeing servants had stolen the poison needed to do it painlessly, and he couldn’t gather the courage to kill himself with a blade.
* Joseph Stalin, perhaps the most successful dictator of the twentieth century. Stalin rose to power and then ruled by carefully placing people who were personally loyal to him in key positions. Then he appointed another layer of loyalists to watch the first group. Then he periodically repressed key subordinates and replaced them with ambitious underlings. When Stalin joined the Bolshevik Party, Russia was suffering from a huge problem of elite overproduction,... Stalin had taken care of this problem by ruthlessly exterminating this elite “surplus.” He essentially created a pipeline for ambitious aspirants to enter the elite, progress up the ranks, and then be executed or sent to labor camps... His huge power came from his influence over the elites and the common people. But even more importantly, the structural forces were on his side. New research by economists has shown that despite the brutality of Stalin’s industrialization, the life of common people did get better during the 1930s, as hard as it may be to look past the millions of deaths from famine following mass agricultural collectivization.
Factionalism is “sharply polarized and uncompromising competition between blocs pursuing parochial interests at the national level. This winner-take-all approach to politics is often accompanied by confrontational mass mobilization,... Partial autocracies were intermediate in stability, and the remaining regime classes (partial democracies without factionalism, full democracies, and full autocracies) were relatively stable... Government repression of a minority group further elevates the chances that the minority will resort to arms.
Currently: Although Ukrainian oligarchs ruled the country unrestrained by any other internal checks, they did not become a cohesive ruling class. Instead, they formed several factions that struggled against each other using as weapons electoral politics, semilegal seizure of property, and even imprisonment.
In reality, the 2014 Ukrainian revolution was no more a people’s revolution than any other revolution in history. It was driven by the same forces that we have discussed in the pages of this book—popular immiseration and elite overproduction. The people didn’t gain as a result of this revolution. Ukrainian politics continued to be as corrupt as before.
A better conclusion is that not all states with the trappings of democracy are run for the benefit of broad segments of the population.
Thus, the heart of the MPF model is the relative wage and the wealth pump that it powers... The number of radicals in proportion to the total population, therefore, is a key variable that the MPF model needs to track. <> The process of radicalization works like a disease that, as it spreads, changes people’s behaviors and makes them act in violent ways... It is quite similar to equations used by epidemiologists—for example, in forecasting the dynamics of COVID outbreaks.
The MPF engine is a kind of “morality tale,” like the story of a kind girl and an unkind girl, a narrative motif that is present in hundreds of traditional societies... the most important insight from the MPF model is that it is too late to avert our current crisis. But we can avoid the next period of social breakdown in the second half of the twenty-first century, if we act soon to bring the relative wage up to the equilibrium level (thus shutting down elite overproduction) and keep it there.
One increasingly visible sign of polarization within the business community is the rise of charitable foundations pushing extreme ideological agendas. At one end of the spectrum are the ultraconservative foundations: Charles Koch, the Mercer Family, Sarah Scaife, and others. Domhoff calls them a “policy-obstruction network.”
In the end, it was an FBI agent who proposed they kidnap the governor of Michigan. Nearly half of the paramilitary group that planned to kidnap, put on trial, and execute Whitmer were feds or informers. It is ironic that the organizational vacuum on the far right is so extreme that this far-right terrorist group had to be organized by the FBI.
In order not to lose elections, the reasoning goes, the party needs to move to the center. The “center,” of course, is the policies favored by the ruling class. <> On the ideological front, left-wing dissidents get very different treatment depending on the content of their critiques. Cultural left issues—race, ethnicity, LGBTQ+, intersectionality—occupy large swaths of the corporate media. Populist economic issues and, especially, critique of American militarism, much less so.
Before 2016, the Republican Party was the stronghold of the ruling class, a vehicle for the 1 percent. But today, as I write this book, the Republicans are making a transition to becoming a true revolutionary party.
Some politicians on the right are pure culture warriors, while others focus on populist issues. Currently, the most interesting phenomenon, which may or may not turn out to be the crystallization nucleus, is that of Tucker Carlson. Carlson is interesting because he is the most outspoken antiestablishment critic operating within the corporate media.
As of late 2022, we have no way of knowing whether Carlson, Vance, and, more generally, NatCons will succeed in taking over the Republican Party. But the NatCons are clearly reshaping the GOP, building on what has already been accomplished by Trump and Bannon. As Jason Zengerle wrote in The New York Times, “Depending on your point of view, NatCons are either attempting to add intellectual heft to Trumpism or trying to reverse-engineer an intellectual doctrine to match Trump’s lizard-brain populism.”
We found that population declines are quite common—half of the exits from crisis resulted in a population loss. Thirty percent of exits were associated with a major epidemic.
England: The Chartist Period (1819–1867) The period is named after the 1838 People’s Charter, a formal document of protestation calling for these reforms... Yet major civil war or outright rebellion did not materialize... Part of the answer has to do with England benefiting from the resources afforded by its extensive empire... Many elite aspirants frustrated with the saturation of prestigious and powerful positions at home went overseas—some to positions in the colonial administration, others as private citizens... In response to unrest, a sizable fraction of the English political elite became persuaded of the need for several critical reforms. In 1832, the franchise was extended to smaller landowners and some urban residents. The Reform Act of 1832 also shifted the balance of power away from the landed gentry (the squirearchy) in favor of the upwardly mobile commercial elites by removing “rotten boroughs” (with tiny populations controlled by wealthy patrons) and turning major commercial and industrial cities into separate boroughs... One of the most important measures that alleviated immiseration was the repeal of the Corn Laws that had imposed tariffs on the import of grains, benefiting large landowners but inflating the price of staple food products in domestic markets.
Toward the end of the fifteenth century, the Muscovite state, the gentry, and the peasants forged a tripartite social contract, according to which the gentry would serve in the army, while the peasants would work to support these warriors and the state (which was minuscule, anyway, and staffed with gentry who were compensated in the form of land with peasants). Those gentry who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, serve had land (and peasants) taken away from them. This compact enabled Muscovy, which inhabited an extremely tough geopolitical neighborhood, surrounded by powerful enemies on all sides (except the north), to survive and expand into a powerful empire. The social contract was renewed under Peter the Great.. it was abandoned as a result of the “gentry revolution” of 1762, when Peter III abolished the service obligations of the noble landowners to the state. By 1860, the nobility had become a parasitic class
The Emancipation Reform of 1861, in particular, pleased neither peasants nor noble serf-owners... This process created huge numbers of counter-elites, which fed the growth of radicals, such as anarchists and social revolutionaries. A wave of terrorist acts roiled Russia during the 1860s and ’70s. Alexander II, who became known as Alexander the Liberator, paid the ultimate price for his liberalization policy—he was assassinated in 1881
* there is no permanent solution. A balanced social system with the wealth pump shut down is an unstable equilibrium that takes constant effort to maintain—like riding a bicycle. This instability is due to one of the most fundamental principles in sociology, the “iron law of oligarchy,”[16] which states that when an interest group acquires a lot of power, it inevitably starts using this power in self-interested ways... The early Russian Empire, for example, was a service state in which everybody served: the peasants, the nobility, and the ruler. (Peter I is a good example of a service tsar but not the only one.) However, the nobility had more power than the other players, and they eventually subverted the tripartite compact by freeing themselves from service. Then they turned on the wealth pump—because they could—oppressing the peasants and becoming a parasitic class. We see the same process, again and again, in all historical states, which is why instability waves always recur.
An even more worrying development is the transition in Western democracies from “class-based party systems” to “multi-elite party systems.” Earlier in the book (chapter 8), we discussed this transition in the United States, where the Democratic Party, a party of the working class during the New Deal, became by 2000 the party of the credentialed 10 percent. The rival party, the Republican Party, primarily served the wealthy 1 percent, leaving the 90 percent out in the cold.
* What is little appreciated is that although democratic institutions are the best (or least bad) way of governing societies, democracies are particularly vulnerable to being subverted by plutocrats. Ideology may be the softest, gentlest form of power, but it is the key one in democratic societies. The plutocrats can use their wealth to buy mass media, to fund think tanks, and to handsomely reward those social influencers who promote their messages.
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Although the numerical advantage of the North is four, it actually translates into a warfare advantage of four squared, which is sixteen. This mathematical result is known as Lanchester’s square law.
One of the earliest attempts to express morale in numbers was made by, of all people, the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. Few people realize that Tolstoy’s magisterial opus, War and Peace, which he started writing in 1863, just at the peak of the American Civil War, has a second appendix in which he discusses a science of history.
Jack’s first detailed dissertation proposal to research the relationship between population growth and revolutions was flatly rejected by his graduate committee.
an unusually high frequency of breaks on the left ulna (forearm) are good indicators of violence committed with blunt objects. Just imagine your reaction if someone were about to hit you with a baseball bat. Your arms would likely go up in an attempt to protect your head, and if your attacker was right-handed, you would be hit on the left forearm.

Karen Russell's depiction of the Dust Bowl is a call to remembrance of past sins.

• Every hide brings a penny bounty. So many turnipy sweating bodies and a festive feeling in the air like a penny rubbed between two fingers, like blood shocked into a socket. A smell that reminds you of the room where babies are born. When you try to turn and run away, Papa grabs you... “Settle down, Harp—” Papa is angry. He pours your name over your head like scalding water.
• You are screaming with the rabbits. Your birthday wish is to get to the end of this sound. Quiet comes at last. The men’s arms rest against their sides like tools in a shed. Women are hanging the dead jacks to dry by their long ears. Every twitching rabbit’s foot has stilled. Inside of you, the screaming continues.
• * It felt as if a knife had scraped the marrow from my bones. Something vital inside me had liquefied and drained away, and in its place was this new weightlessness. Lightness and wrongness, a blanketing whiteness that ran up my spine and seeped out of my mouth. Bankrupt was the word that rose in my mind.
• We were four years into the worst drought that any newcomer to the Great Plains had ever experienced. Other beings kept older diaries. Cored cottonwood trees told a millennial story written in wavy circles that no politician had cared to read. Congressmen train themselves to think in election cycles, not planetary ones.
• * Uz had been having brownouts for months. Plagues of jaws and mandibles. Grasshoppers rattled down on the tractor cabs from hissing clouds. Thousands of jackrabbits fanned over the Plains, chewing through anything green. Winged indigo beetles blew in from God alone knew where, husks shaped like hourglasses that nobody on the High Plains had ever seen before 1931. Red sand from Oklahoma and black dirt from Kansas and dove gray earth from the eastern plains of Colorado formed a rolling ceiling of dust above Uz that flashed with heat lightning.
• The prairie witches... Absorbing and storing my customers’ memories. Banking secrets for the townspeople of Uz. Sins and crimes, .. As an attic knows about its ghosts. Their dead were alive inside me, patiently waiting to be recollected. The weight of these deposits refreighted me. After a transfer, I often felt a heavy ache in my rib cage or my pelvis—sometimes a swimmy brightness like goldfish circling my chest
• You cried out, and I realized with wonder that I was the one You were calling for. I was the answer to your question. The antidote to your distress, your fear, your ravening hunger, your life-thirst. I stared into your fierce, dark eyes, born open. We fluttered in and out of sleep together, in a dream of milk and heat and love. Then came the block of hours which were stolen from me
• * Then I’d remember: she’d been murdered and I’d been sent to live with her gray-haired brother. Every morning that I wake up here, I enter and exit that same tunnel of facts. I wake to a view of the fallowland, tangled in my dead mother’s blue cotton sheets in my dead mother’s bed, a bad dream that has continued for almost two years without interruption.
• When I found him, the fog of hope cinched itself into a disappointment that was exactly Harp Oletsky’s height and shape. This rat-gnawed corncob of a man
• her gift for reviving sick birds and bald plants; her laughter that fell like rain inside our house, washing the sticky sadness from the walls; her habit of sticking out her tongue when she was reading or sewing. Right from the start, I understood that I was going to be alone with her. My mama’s only pallbearer. Even dead, she still needs my care.
• “Female basketball is a freak show.” Dottie Iscoe clearly did not know about Babe Didrikson and the Barnstorming Reds, or the AAU tournaments with their prize money and college scholarships. We all held on to the prospect of being a prospect.
• * Black Sunday began as a gash in the western sky, growing wider and wider and spilling down dirt instead of blood. Sometimes I imagine the glee of those journalists at the New York City papers—typing up the story of our worst day in their fancy language. Adjusting the margins and pushing our tragedy into a skinny column, just like old Marvin at the funeral home shoving a tall corpse into a tight suit.
• April 14 broke without augury, and then at 3:00 p.m., not half an hour after I said goodbye to Ed and got back on the road, midnight ran over the sun. It was darker and louder than any moonless night has ever been. The soil rose in mutiny against the farmer.
• Lada’s girl came to Uz with a little smirk tied to her face. Not a smile. More like a bowline knot. I confess that I enjoyed watching it unravel. It proved to me that my niece was a child after all.
• * that is a sight that will never leave me. The waves of earth crashing over the prairie. The sky exhaling all her birds.
• As if we are lucky to be alive at all in the world that they control. Ask any stone or flower if it feels grateful to be here. Your mother does not have much advice to pass on, but I can tell you when to be wary. You should be grateful is a sentence that the powerful wield like a cudgel.
• I refused to feel grateful to Dottie. But I did feel a jolt of sky-blue surprise. Kindness has its own electric current.
• The Sheriff never pays me for taking these strangers’ deposits. He comes to the boardinghouse without warning and drags me to Cell 8. Once I saw his wife sponging blood off a wall, and I thought: That is all I am to Victor Iscoe. He needs me to sponge up people’s dangerous recollections.
• “Get off that telephone, big ears,” my uncle shouted at me from the kitchen. “I should have never gotten wired up.” <> “Doomsday is everybody’s business, Uncle!”
• Church ladies threw Bible verses at me with the same frenzy that they tossed lilies and clumps of sod at the open graves, eager to seal up a hole. I got the sense they would have loved to bury me, too. Tidier that way. In the hours and weeks following her death, people crossed the street to hug me and offer me their condolences, shoving them my way with potluck flair. A month later, these same people crossed the street to avoid me. Like I was a little hatchet walking around town.
• _So Job died, being old and full of days.
  Full of days. That line always struck me. Even as a boy, I felt a heaviness when Papa read it. Some premonition of age. Old Uzians seemed as arid as the land to me, wrinkled and brittle. Yet I heard that line and I understood that in some secret region their rivers ran full of days. Soon enough, their life’s time would overrun its banks.
• Otto’s land dumped on top of my land when the wind blew from the southeast. My land dumped on Otto’s when the wind changed direction. Turns out, these lines we’d drawn so painstakingly around what we owned, they only existed on paper. There was some excitement in that, I’ll admit. Everything mixing with everything else, as dust does.
• By 1934, I was living on the runoff of my labor. Do that for long enough, you start to feel like a dog trying to quench his thirst with his sweat. You’re paying the bank for the privilege of working your land. That’s the whole trap of it.
• Cherry began rolling into and out of her trances almost instantly. “Oh, I worked in a brothel,” she told me. “I’m just refining a trick I learned on my back. I’ve got years of ‘going blank’ and blinking back to life under my belt. Kettle is just teaching me vocabulary. I already knew how to do it, I just didn’t know to call it witchcraft.
• * No one would ever guess that I had once carried a baby to term. But the space You left in me remained open. With each passing day, it seemed to deepen and widen. Every witch I’ve ever met has experienced a shock from which she never recovered, a loss that is ongoing—the way I lost You. I scan every crowd for a face that might be yours. I see your absence everywhere. So you see, Son, in this strange way, You birthed me. When You vanished from my arms, I became a prairie witch... Cherry takes a mechanical view of what happened inside us. We survived a blast that opened a door. In most people, the door becomes a wall again. Time heals it. Time seals it shut. For us, there is no more door. There is a permanent opening—a vacancy. Space for rent.
• * “Damn. I bet whoever took him makes a killing selling babies.” To my horror, I heard a door shut and settle on its hinges inside him. Your abduction made sense to him. Money had made sense of it. His face puckered effortfully in unconvincing sympathy, but was he outraged? Was he surprised? No, “it all added up”—the theft of my baby transformed into the columns on a profit and loss statement.
  Why should money make evil comprehensible to anyone? But it does precisely this. Greed, violence, cruelty—money can explain them. Money can make the most heinous act seem like a sane one. A business decision, a necessary calculation. Evil’s genius is to costume itself as sense.
• All those expiring Polish songs, unsung by any Oletsky for half a century. Glue stuck half the pages together. It hurt my stomach to think about the trapped notes.
• Coach was still frowning at us. “There’s more, ladies,” he said. <> And once again, I failed to guess how bad things can get from one minute to the next.
• Coach is often praised by other light-skinned men at our games, within earshot of Nell, for coaching Nell. It happens at every game we play, Home and Away. Other White people call Coach “an enlightened man” for doing what any child of five does naturally. Nobody had to teach us how to play together.
• He stared without interest at the miracle in front of him. Wide eyes empty as a pantry.
• * My wheat field shimmered like a shallow lake in the afternoon light. Green piled on green from the barn to the road, the even stands shifting with the dry wind. City people think that blue is the color of water, but farmers know otherwise. Plants are where the water goes and grows—and green is the color water wears all spring.
• God invented a thousand clocks, and winter wheat is one of the most beautiful. Green in its infancy becomes the husky red-gold of a mature crop in a matter of weeks.
• As a boy, I felt certain that my family was cursed. <> Now that I’ve been alive for nearly half a century, I know how commonplace the most outrageous tragedies turn out to be.
• Still, I won’t forget the true story of how my brother died. I won’t pay a prairie witch to put Frank out of my mind. He still draws breaths inside me. I do not want to lose my brother a second time.
• Smiling did not seem to come naturally to my mentor. I pictured a needle diving and resurfacing, stitching the witch’s face on.
• I remembered my mother unpinning her hair at night, shaking her bun loose across her bare shoulders. Time came swinging down around us, and I felt us relaxing into each other’s presence.
• Afterward we rode the trolley car and I saw something that looked like an orchard of glowing clementines in downtown Omaha. So many tiny electrified lights. I asked my nonna if I could pick one, and she laughed and said no, they were for everyone, but I could take them home in my mind.
• It burns in a hue for which I have no name. A color that to my watering eyes seems newborn in our world. It reminds me of too many earth colors at once. Snakeskin in sunshine. Oily rainbows. Mother-of-pearl seashells. Blue-black corn kernels. Blood rounding out of a child’s cut finger. Wings shaking off water. Somehow it’s all of them and none of them. The stars look dull as rocks above this blazing light... Whatever keeps shining out of the fallowland persists inside me well past dawn. Daylight doesn’t extinguish its memory.
• We were given false names on our first day... Mine was Anne Fayeweather, a costume that made me sound to myself like a wooden doll with blond braids... We were reassured by the Examiner, in his patronizing gurgle, that sexual deviance was not always proof of evil. It could also be, he said, a sign of feeble-mindedness.
• My fingers walked to the lilies of the field, Mathew 6:28, as if they were traveling home. These were Nonna Onofria’s favorite verses. I wanted to be a lily, growing instead of toiling.
• * I could see the dim shapes inside the automobiles rattling down on the road, and it shocked me to realize that I was such a shape to them, a flash of color bleeding off, a pebble ticking off the glass. Even close up, we must not have seemed quite real to these motorists. We must have looked pitiable to them. Or—worse—picturesque. A row of pregnant women kneeling among the beans and peas and viny gourds.
• Four weeks. Five weeks. It was a slow race to meet Your gaze.
• I had at least a hundred cousins that I’d never met and for whom I could feel nothing but a queasy sense of superiority, and then the pity that is pride’s afterthought... I grew up nourished by a story, the story of my good fortune—I was an American citizen, I lived in the richest country in the world, where I would learn English, work hard, marry well, and improve upon my parents’ great sacrifice.
• My true self huddled behind my maze of bones, peering through my eyeholes.
• After Nonna died, I lost my faith that anything had weight. Giancarlo’s arms around my waist settled me back into myself.
• I felt a smile spilling messily all over my face... Laughter brimmed in the witch’s voice, lifting it a full octave. I felt a spike of game day joy.
• “Listen, I won’t let anybody hurt you,” I said. Tenderness rushed into my voice like blood to a cut. It surprised us both.
• This was exactly what the CCC men were doing on the vacant land west of the depot, I noted. Planting saplings as windbreaks. Seeding cover crops. We could do that same work inside of people. We wouldn’t be lying to hurt anyone. No—we’d be dropping anchors inside them. Weighting them down, so they did not blow off.
• “Now, Mrs. Wheeler,” said the Antidote, bricked up behind her smile. “You know the rules. It’s your secret from here on out.
• “At least the case is closed,” said Ellda in her porcelain voice.
• What word exists to describe that feeling of extinction, expansion? Anybody watching would have seen seven dirty young women, tossing a ball above melting chalk lines. Only we understood what we were doing. The wonderful, terrible stakes of every pass. We were stitching ourselves together. As night descended, we had successfully remade ourselves into a ferocious, panting animal. The Dangers. One team, plural.
• Not-sap. Not-flint. Not-frost. I am overly familiar with the bone color of winterkill. The bludgeoned yellow of wheat that’s been cooked by the drought. Those are the colors in which I’d paint my life story. Not this marvelous hue. Wonder is not a comfortable place to reside, I am learning.
• When you’re late, even your shadow becomes a disturbance. I know this because I’m an early bird, and early birds’ nests are continuously disturbed by new arrivals. I keep my shadow tucked neatly beneath me, inconveniencing nobody.
• He was staring up at me with his sparse shock of black hair and a child’s hungry eyes, as if he wanted to spoon my luck out of me and spread it golden on toast.
• Photographs substitute for memories, he told me at our first meeting. “You must strive to become part of the environment. To be an unobtrusive presence.
• My mother seemed to feel she was dishonoring the subjects of my portraits by seeing them framed through my eyes. A photograph was a “misremembering,” she told me. “But everybody misremembers vividly, Mama,” I’d said.
• Later I learned he did the same thing to Mydans and Evans and Lange and Shahn. But in the beginning, it felt so personal. Depending on how much he hated the work I’d made, he might punch along the edges.
• When I became a Resettlement photographer, Arthur Rothstein’s Fleeing a Dust Storm had already been reproduced a hundred times in newspapers around the country... My guess is that Arthur Rothstein, with his genius for storytelling, gave these two characters some direction. It is an incredible photograph. It shows you what you might see if a camera could pierce the heart of a black blizzard. If there were sufficient light for the camera to record it. If the high winds didn’t make even ordinary sight all but impossible.
• I wanted only to jump into my trance, but the new buoyancy wouldn’t allow it. I shut my eyes and pictured the stars winking out. I begged the night sky to open inside me, so that I could exit the room.
• Vick rubbed his head, feeling agitated. It had been a stroke of genius to use the rabbit’s feet to stitch the open cases together. Solving seven murders at once? It was his finest moment as a lawman.
• If the murdered girls had been, instead of Nina Rose and Olga Kucera, some woman without prospects or family in town. Those girls made for a salable tragedy—they had their whole golden lives ahead of them. But women were always going missing. That was a fact of life throughout the howling world.
• Percival’s scowl deepened, not in thought but in submission to reality. His expression changed very gradually. It was like watching a boot heel sinking into the mud, a terrible fact forcing itself into his awareness. At last he gasped, and the light left his eyes.
• The moon sulked down on them through a scrim of reddish dust. The wailing seemed to approach the pair from every direction, but without any hurry, like a trap closing in slow motion.
• He recognized them now. The high school team. They’d won the Region 7 championship, big news for a sleepy town last year. He’d seen them racing downcourt with their pale and dark hair lifting behind them like claws. <> “If these girls belonged to anyone, they wouldn’t be out here alone a quarter to midnight …”
• * I’d just completed one of the best days of my life, and to my great surprise I expected more of them. Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. I saw golden grain in my field, laid against the fallow strips. Carloads of wheat, bound for all parts of the world. I felt that I was, for the first time in the history of our family, speaking American.
• I saw that I had violated his idea of how my visit should go: I was not overly grateful. I was not dishonest. I did not remake my face into a flattering mirror of the man and his work.
• A sheriff in a rural county may not sound like much power to scrap over. But taking conscious deposits has been a rapid education. I have learned a great deal more about where power flows and what it does.
• We shared whatever solutions we could find to the problem of time—the gangplank of our one-year sentence, waiting to meet our babies, waiting for freedom from waiting.
• I knew something troubling. Hardy got it from Shakespeare. King Lear. And Lear was talking about himself, not his daughter. That’s how fathers and kings see themselves, I guess. More sinned against than sinning.
• “That’s a fermata,” Zintka explained to me, pointing at the nothingness that spread between the tree trunks—the columns of darkness.
  “A fermata?”
  “It’s a musical term. I think about it often here. It means ‘a pregnant pause.’ ”
• I have swallowed lifetimes, and lost them. It feels miraculous that I can still recollect any fraction of the past. Urgently I feel that I must share with You the little that I do know, and remember. Otherwise we “fallen women” will shrink away into objects of pity, living curios. Counterfeiters like me will continue to erase us from sight. Nathalee’s secret, Stencil’s jokes, Zintka’s hitchhiking. Please carry them with me. Please go on knowing us, Son.
• * I hadn’t known—no one had ever told me—that I was a soldier in a war. We newcomers to the Great Plains were invited out here by the U.S. government to hold ground. The Homestead Act, the Dawes Act, all part of a battle plan. Over time, light-skinned children would grow old in this West with no memory of an earlier home, no awareness that they were the daughters and the sons of an invading army—second- and third- and fourth- and fifth-generation Americans. Putting Native lands into White hands. Putting forests and plains into production. Turning soil into cash.
• * You loved to roller-skate. It was one of the first things I ever learned about You. That night, You kicked like a jackrabbit, wild under my ribs.
  Melody giggled, sounding as drunk as I felt. We had finished Stencil’s hooch. You might assume this would make four hugely pregnant women even more ungainly. Would you believe me if I told you that we soared? It was a foolish risk. It was a necessary risk—one we were choosing to take. Carving up the wooden floor felt nothing like carving our initials into the dormitory walls...
  Icarus should have hit the roller-skating rink—it would have gone so much better for him. Flying around in a circle on the wooden floor, safe from the fatal sun. We skated four across, like a single graceful wing. Pleasure, pleasure, pleasure, spinning faster and faster. Two hearts accelerating inside each of our huge bodies.
• Q: What is the evil this world runs on? A: Better you than me.
• As time passed, my shame became a line of fire and I cowered behind it, afraid to acknowledge my part in the loss of her son, even to myself.
• Valeria, who talks to animals as if they are visiting dignitaries from a superior planet, seemed embarrassed by my reaction.
• I could see the other Dangers were wilting in the face of all that love. Loneliness is unhelpful as fuel. I pushed that feeling aside and felt around for more useful ones—jealousy, blame, rage, contempt. These I can pump up into my body. My uncle says I live on top of an oil field of anger. Never a bad thing on game day.
• * Rolling our ankles and taking elbows to the stomach? Every one of us absorbed those blows for the team. I felt annoyed at the tiny Ellda kneeling in my imagination. I wanted to banish her smiling, heart-shaped face from my awareness. Her sticky, unwashed hair and her eagerness to be a good sport, to help the team out—all things that girls are trained to do from birth. What’s done is done, Ellda. The thought was like a loose knot I had to keep retying.
• Was I doing it wrong? She held me low on my waist and pulled me against her, like the braver boys at school dances. Our hands went anywhere they pleased. Nobody was chaperoning them.
• “No! Stay with me!” Her voice jumped an octave and she grabbed my shoulders. “Stay in your body tonight, Oletsky.” Her fear felt like a valentine to me in the dark lobby.
• But I could see that it was work. Real spooky work. She was in a kind of trance, squinting at the sky through a wire frame, choosing which clouds to corral... She told me that the stark contrast between the shallow water of the harbor and the open sea made for beautiful black-and-white prints. I thought I understood her way of looking into things, although I felt too clumsy to put words to what I knew from the farm. How I also read tones and textures in my fields to learn about the world below the soil. How light on the surface helps me conjecture about the depths.
• The sky looked unbreakably blue.
• “All right. You’re hiding in our kitchen. Miss Allfrey is developing pictures underground. The sun is setting in an hour. Should I be gathering linens, Uncle?”
• * Withdrawing money from a bank, that’s a happy affair. Withdrawing a memory from the witch nearly killed me. Her words parted me like a knife tugging through a rabbit, opening me from stomach to neck. Into that seam poured the light of my father’s days. My ribs flared, trying to make room for Tomasz Oletsky’s life.
• The Chancellor publicly spoke of his wish to expel us. He planned to rid his German Empire of Poles one way or another—either by forced exile, or by “germanizing” us. These threats colored my youth like ink in water. I was nine years of age when the soldiers burned our church. Kulturkampf was the German word for our nightmare. “The Polish Question” had one solution.
• How does any man assess the integrity of another? The Agent had fine clothes and black calfskin boots with rounded shanks. The shoeblack made them glow like a December lake. He was a little overweight and spoke in a genial, meandering tone—not at all what I had expected from a merchant selling us America.
• * We passed towns under construction, and towns already abandoned—part of my education was learning to distinguish between them. The signs of life became easier to interpret. The surveyors’ white flags meant a town was newborn. Laundry draped on the sides of hills marked the roofs of sod houses. Cavelike clouds promised water but delivered only shadows. Ania held my hand as we waded into the tallgrass prairie at a water stop, sending up swirling mists of pale blue and yellow butterflies.
  The train was paused for a full day by the migrating buffalo. The great herd looked like a mountain in pieces, tumbling toward us. Hundreds flowed across the tracks. Horned beasts that rose a head above the tallest man in our party... Those men who had firearms shot at the buffalo, and dozens fell with blooming chests and terrible, unforgettable cries.
  Take those cries from me. Take the memory of the great creatures staggering in circles.
• an older Pawnee name: Pahuku. A sacred place to our neighbors, although I never learned why. It felt like heresy even to wonder about heathen beliefs. The Pawnee Confederacy was a nation of four different Caddoan-speaking nations, and living beside the reservation, I learned these names as well: the Chaui, the Kitkahahki, the Pitahawirata, and the Skidi. <> Reservation was certainly a Yankee word. Whereas the Republican River—which I had assumed had been named for the young republic of America—in fact had come from early French mapmakers’ respect for the Kitkahahki political system.
• “He shot the old man to test the power of his new gun.”... “Nothing happened to him.” She shook her head with a patient sort of sorrow. “The fellow who pulled the trigger is still living right outside Columbus. Everybody knows who done it, too. No mystery there. Some saw.”
• The Indians had backfired, preventing Mitchell’s fire from spreading, the innkeeper explained. Even so, after General Mitchell’s ten-thousand-mile prairie fire, their game had nothing to live on.
• The federal government was determined to bring someone to trial for the murder of a White settler named McMurty. This Agent, in his sagacity, had seen the mob violence brewing, he told me. He explained his strategy. He had refused to release the annuities owed to the Pawnee people by the government “until some Pawnees were in custody.” He spoke freely to me—I suppose I was no one to fear.
• A broken promise by the government sounds quite removed from one’s own life, but I could measure it precisely in the thinness of a Pawnee child’s wrist and the phlegmy thickness of her grandmother’s cough. I stood behind them at the trading company and felt that knowledge rattle into me. How was any of this my fault? I did not come to America to kill Indians... Eventually my horror rusted over.
• There was a new employee at the school, and what she did to the students was monstrous: “They call her the Counselor. They meet with her and tell her the things that are troubling them. She is hard of hearing, and so they speak into her ear. Tomasz—anything they tell her, everything they say into her strange instrument, it vanishes from their minds. It is evil, what we are doing at that school.”
• * In our home village, a crime committed at night carried a higher penalty—the darkness itself was considered a kind of accomplice, an accessory to murder. In America, everyone who stepped off the platform of the colonist car into the summer of the locusts became a part of the falling night. The long silence, which recruited our silences into it.
• Apparently he had taken the rumor I’d started about “Indians on the warpath” around Uz to heart. Please, Witch, take this memory from me. Ease this rumor I started, and its unintended—its half-intended—consequences, out of my conscience. Let the past stay in the past. Set me free into tomorrow. They call the West “terra nullius.” A blank canvas. My children deserve that. I will not pass these stories down to them. Scrape the blood away from my memory, so that they may paint with sky.
• I cannot begin to understand how this camera chooses and channels these scenes, across the plains of time. But I know the land itself has something to do with it. This land is inside me, teaching me how to see it. Particles of animals, particles of vegetables, particles of soil and sky. To put it in terms that you might better understand, the land is making propaganda for the future of the land.
• Another negative, “Bison Migration,” seems to span centuries. I don’t know if these buffalo are running through the last century or the next one. I have made multiple prints from this same negative, and every one looks different. The grass grows taller and shrinks away to dust, erupts into wildflowers like a children’s choir bursting into song. When I make my test prints, I have a feeling that anything could happen—the herd on the paper might have multiplied, or disappeared.
• I believe we have a choice in all this. There should be a word that means both “blessed” and “cursed,” I have often thought. Maybe that word is “freedom.” Maybe that word is “us.” <> What was a time-traveling camera doing in a Dannebrog pawnshop? Why was I the one who bought it?
• She wouldn’t meet my eyes. “I think the counterfeits are making everybody nuts,” she said. “They don’t remember who they are anymore. Don’t have the tools in their toolshed to understand their own lives. If I boarded up your window and painted a blue sky on it, I bet it would make you nuts too.”
• Why did I have to get wrapped up in this? “Murdered women” had not appeared on Roy Stryker’s shooting script. Neither had “monstrous Sheriff,” or “western town of spellbound amnesiacs,” for that matter. Or prairie witches.
• I felt the words beading on my tongue: I cannot risk my life to save another woman’s son. But as it turns out, I can. I am. We are risking everything together at the Founder’s Day celebration... We make a funny sorority in the farmer’s house. Dell’s practically been living in a tunnel with Allfrey, helping to prepare her gallery.
• Time is short, but time also seems to sprawl here—as if the four of us are stretching it out, each of us holding on to their corner of a blue blanket. Our days here are filled with patient urgency. At night we eat together and argue about the right things to say, the right things to do.
• * What would my own History of the West look like? Not Manifest Destiny, but Invisible Loss. The infinity of what might have been, and never was allowed to be. A History of Childless Mothers and Motherless Children. It would include a picture of enduring love. The love that flies with the homing instinct of a bird into and through all weathers, in search of our lost ones, our unforgotten.
  In my History of the West there would also be four pregnant women, roller-skating.
• Your mother is still a powerful witch, Son. I would like to learn a new use for my emptiness—my spaciousness. Look at the rosewood mandolin in the corner of this bedroom. People string catgut over a hole, and send music pouring into the atmosphere. Maybe I can restring myself, and learn how to make music from my hollow place.
• It made me wish my mother was here to tease him with me. Remembering someone you’ve lost can feel like drinking mist. I was thirsty for more.
• “Lada could make a J with her skate blade,” my uncle told me. “Of all the people on the ice, she was the only one who could do that.” His smile made my eyes ache. Forty years later, he was still proud that his sister could autograph the lake.
• “No. I was just pouring myself a warm bath of self-pity.”
• Imagining, like Job before me, that I was at the heart of the mystery. What did the whirlwind do to Job? It spun him around to see all of creation. Forests and mountains, rivers and stars. Whales, crocodiles, hippos, eagles. The storehouse of the snows. The green womb of water. Suddenly Job could hear the voice of God everywhere—not only in the whirlwind, but in all creation. Job got pulled out of his suffering and his confusion, out of the middle of his mind, and replanted with a universe inside him.
  When the whirlwind set Job down again, he was still in Uz, but his field of vision had been transformed. My papa’s deposit had spun me around too, and shown me where to throw my crumb. The bubble of luck meant something different to me now that we had found a purpose for it.
• Surprise is a good teacher. The Graflex Speed Graphic had made portraits of an abundance that looked nothing like the old boom times in Uz—no carloads of wheat next to the shanties and tents of Hoovervilles. Allfrey’s shots were panoramic, but these were not lonely vistas, single farms set against the dying prairie. They were crowded with lifetimes.<> Happiness and beauty and abundance accused me just as forcefully, from the opposite direction.
• In her clear, calm voice, she did what I had been unable to do. She got the room on our side. The speed of it frightened me. A mob swings like a fist. Many times I have experienced the fickleness of the crowd’s support. But I had always been part of the crowd, riding the pendulum composed of my fellow Grangers. Never once had I been on this side of the podium.
• How the goal was to turn “wasteland” into profit, to transform grassland into steaks and leather and wheat for export. To turn Native lands into White ones. Our grandparents and our parents settled across Native lands like a snowbank, and when the spring thaw came, there was a crop of kids like me, like us, with no memory of anything but our childhood on the prairie.
• * we can see clearly what this system of ours produces: end-of-the-world weather and desecrated earth. <> What I wanted to say was that I’d soared as the crow flies inside my father’s memory, and I’d seen more than he was able to see: the plow that broke these plains was the plow that broke my family back in German-occupied Poland: the plow of empire. The plow that displaces and murders people, tearing them from their homes.
• * Thunder shook the windows, through which I witnessed a miracle. <> In the yard of the Grange Hall, on a carpet of dying brown grass, a crowd of dozens stood in silent prayer. People were fanning out, catching the water on their outstretched tongues. I stood, then walked outside to join them. Single droplets became an even sheet. Everything was running paint. The dry air became moist skin. We were all united inside the rain. Something broke loose inside my chest and came rolling down my cheeks. I stood anonymously in the middle of the crowd that had wanted me dead only moments earlier. Every face seemed to bloom. To dilate in water.
• A slow-blinking Harp Oletsky pushed his nose almost to the windshield, trying to find the road. I realized I was holding my camera in the exact same way that the witch held her earhorn and the girl held her filthy ball, using it to anchor me to my purpose, and I smiled. This life will surprise you. A month ago, I knew none of these people.
• The Scarecrow: It was such a little thing that I was able to do to help her. Such a small contribution to the drama unfolding. I inclined into the wind. Ever so slightly, I felt a wall yield. A shift like a bead of rain rolling down a leaf. With all of my will, I urged the hat forward, and the wind met me in this endeavor.
• I saw my opportunity. It was crazy luck, crazy timing—although no crazier than anything else that had happened to me. Just kinder. <> Defense to offense. It’s my favorite pivot. The scarecrow’s hat came free and flew directly into Sheriff Iscoe’s face. The way he howled, you’d think it gouged his eye out. So easily, as if I were stooping to pluck my namesake flower, I picked up his gun.
• “Why would anyone run from a color like that?” Cleo asked. <> I knelt to stroke the cat’s belly, like a witch in a storybook. “Vick did not want to change his reflection in the mirror,” I said.
• More than the hugeness of our sorrows, our losses that we can only absorb with the stupefaction of our animals, soft-eyed and uncomprehending. <> So much of what we have laid up in these Vaults turns out to be happiness. Scrolled maps to other worlds, the dreams we forgot, the unthought possible. The kind, laughing hearts that we had as children, we can recover.
• If the Earth had rolled on its axis after an eclipse, unlidding the sun, it could not have felt any more miraculous to me than Allfrey’s portrait of Lada Oletsky.

Ling Ma's descriptions of Candice's immigrant parents ring true, but I'm not sure how that fits with the other part of the novel, the zombie apocapolyse part. 

• Google would not last long. Neither would the internet. Or any of the infrastructure, but in the beginning of the Beginning let us brag, if only to ourselves in the absence of others. Because who was there to envy us, to be proud of us? Our Googlings darkened, turned inward. We Googled maslow’s pyramid to see how many of the need levels we could already fulfill. The first two.
• Our self-appointed leader was Bob, a short, stout man who had worked in information technology. He was slightly older than us, though by how much it seemed rude to ask. He was Goth when he felt like it. He knew about being alone.
• What is the internet but collective memory? Anything that had been done before we could do better. The Heimlich maneuver. Breech births. The fox-trot. Glycerin bombs. Bespoke candle making. Lurking in our limited gene pools may swim metastatic brain tumors and every type of depression and recessed cystic fibrosis, but also high IQs and proficiencies with Romance languages. We could move on from this. We could be better. <> Anything was better than what we felt. We had shame, so much shame at being the few survivors.
• * I was thinking about how New York is possibly the only place in which most people have already lived, in some sense, in the public imagination, before they ever arrive.
• disillusioned with living in New York. Something along the lines of: the city, New York fucking City, tedious and boring, its charms as illusory as its facade of authenticity. Its lines were too long. Everything was a status symbol and everything cost too much. There were so many on-trend consumers, standing in lines for blocks to experience a fad dessert, gimmicky art exhibits, a new retail concept store. We were all making such uninspired lifestyle choices.
• * Me, nothing really weighed on me, nothing unique. Me, I held down an office job and fiddled around with some photography when the moon hit the Gowanus right. Or something like that, the usual ways of justifying your life, of passing time. With the money I made, I bought Shiseido facial exfoliants, Blue Bottle coffee, Uniqlo cashmere.
• Some R&B track with jumpy bass tremored the ceiling. It was that time of night again, when the neighbor upstairs brooded to sad songs with good beats... Even the better, more artfully composed images were just Eggleston knockoffs, Stephen Shore derivatives. For these and other reasons, I hardly updated the blog anymore. I hardly took pictures anymore.
• As our business relies on overseas suppliers, especially those in southern China, we are taking precautionary measures with this announcement of Shen Fever.
• carried themselves like a rarefied breed, peacocking through the hallways in Fracas-scented flocks. They worked exclusively on the most detail-intensive, design-savvy projects—coffee-table books and color-sensitive exhibition catalogs. Their clients were galleries, museum presses, and, most important, the big glossy art publishers. Phaidon, Rizzoli, and Taschen.
• * No one can work in Bibles that long without coming to a certain respect for the object itself. It is a temperamental, difficult animal, its fragile pages prone to ripping, its book block prone to warping, especially in the humidity of South Asian monsoon season. Of any book, the Bible embodies the purest form of product packaging, the same content repackaged a million times over, in new combinations ad infinitum. Every season, I was trotted out to publisher clients to expound on the latest trends in synthetic leathers, the newest developments in foil embossing and gilding. I have overseen production on so many Bibles that I can’t look at one without disassembling it down to its varied, assorted offal: paper stock, ribbon marker, endsheets, mull lining, and cover.
• * With vampire narrative, the danger lies in the villain’s intentions, his underlying character. There are good vampires, there are bad vampires. Think of Interview with the Vampire. Or even Twilight. These are character narratives. <> Now, on the other hand, he continued, let’s think about the zombie narrative. It’s not about a specific villain. One zombie can be easily killed, but a hundred zombies is another issue. Only amassed do they really pose a threat. This narrative, then, is not about any individual entity, per se, but about an abstract force: the force of the mob, of mob mentality. Perhaps it’s better known these days as the hive mind. You can’t see it. You can’t forecast it. It strikes at any time, whenever, wherever, like a natural disaster, a hurricane, an earthquake.
• Bob gave me a look. Candace. When you wake up in a fictitious world, your only frame of reference is fiction.
• * When he wasn’t digging wells or developing crop rotation systems in outlying South American villages, he was reading postcolonial theory in chambray shirts, sheltered by the cool, gentle shade of indigenous palms. Across weak, spotty reception, we held obligatory sessions of phone sex, more for the novelty of the thing than the thing itself. (You’re a fox. I’m a hen. Chicken coop. Go.) He broke up with me via email after the calling card minutes ran out.
• I shaved my legs. I shaved my armpits. To shave my pussy, I lowered myself into the tub, crouching like a sumo wrestler pre-bout. Like a champion sumo wrestler. I placed a hand mirror at the bottom of the basin; I liked to be thorough.
• I often ended up in Chinatown around lunch. Specifically, the Fujianese side, separated by the Bowery from the tourist-pandering Cantonese part. This part was cheaper, more run-down, less conscious of the Western gaze. You could get a plate of dumplings for two dollars, spiked with black vinegar and julienned ginger on a flimsy, buckling Styrofoam plate.
• * Looking at the office workers suspended high above us, I sensed for the first time my father’s desire to leave China and to live in a foreign country. It was the anonymity. He wanted to be unknown, unpossessed by others’ knowledge of him. That was freedom.
• Once we were all seated, we beheld the magnum opus at the center of the table: the shark fin soup was arranged in a crystal punch bowl with a ladle, prom-style. Actually, two punch bowls, one for the original soup, and another for the mysterious vegan version that Jane had made.
• party: When other people are happy, I don’t have to worry about them. There is room for my happiness.
• watching some Italian movie on a laptop with a group of people, the loud exclamatory Italian phrases like typewriter keys clacking.
• * With the both of us lying low, he started kissing me. It was like tumbling down a dizzying Escher staircase of beer-tasting embraces and caresses... I opened up his closet and looked at his wood hangers and shoe trees. He got off on my curiosity. When I kissed him, it was like I was kissing all his things, all the signifiers and trappings of adulthood or success coming at me in a rush. Fucking was just seeing that to its end, a white yacht docking.
• Stalking, Bob liked to say, is an aesthetic experience. It has its rituals and customs. There is prestalking. There is poststalking. Every stalk is different. There are live stalks. There are dead stalks. It isn’t just breaking and entering. It isn’t just looting. It is envisioning the future. It is building the Facility and all of the things that we want to have with us.
• Every morning and evening, she stood in front of the bathroom mirror, going through this process. It wasn’t always the same. Sometimes she’d wash her face in circular clockwise motions, other times counterclockwise. Then there were times when she’d finish with an extra, unsanctioned step: Fujianese face oil, patted onto her face.
• During freshman year of college, she would call to stress the accumulative benefits of a proper facial regimen, her Mandarin always sounding like a reprimand... In your twenties, a skincare regimen is more for preventative measures. Even if you don’t see its effects, the aging process will be worse if you don’t do this, she said.
• This publisher specifically wanted a pleated feature to recall—I can’t remember the designer’s name. He’s well-known for pleats? <> Issey Miyake, I supplied.
• * And, of course, your precious Bibles, he added, the snideness of his tone barely perceptible, but the subtext of which could only mean: We manufacture the emblematic text to propagate your country’s Christian Euro-American ideologies, and for this, for this important task, you and your clients negotiate aggressively over pennies per unit cost, demand that we deliver early with every printing, and undercut the value of our labor year after year.
• He explained that only certain printers in China were granted a license to print Bibles, and even then there were rules.
• The Very Hungry Caterpillar: The worm is very greedy, Balthasar said darkly. He eats all the food and doesn’t share. What lesson does that teach children? To eat with no—he paused, searching for the word—no conscience?
• I had been six when I left China, and my Mandarin vocabulary was regressive, simplistic. I used idioms that only small children would use; my language was frozen in time. I could carry on a casual conversation for ten minutes. Any longer, and I was like a shallow-water dog paddler flailing in deeper ocean waters.
• Ah, your Chinese is very good! he delightedly exclaimed. Which was an inverted form of what Chinese immigrants would say to me: Your English is very good!
• * I looked at Balthasar uneasily. There was a hierarchy of provinces, and each province carried a stereotype, like the cultural biases associated with different New York neighborhoods. He was probably unimpressed.
• this person for whom his voice unfurls slow, drowsy murmurings, like a comb through wet hair.
• The Lexus is to Chinese communism what the Lincoln Town Car is to American democracy, he would say. Both look nice, but not too nice.
• * because TV mixes with my dreams mixes with my memories, we walk along the concourse that runs alongside the river even though there is no river, we turn down boulevards punctuated by palm-tree clusters even though those belong in Singapore, we smoke cigarettes openly even though it’s unseemly for women, especially in my family, to smoke in public. But the feeling, the feeling of being in Fuzhou at night, remains the same. <> When I was a kid, I named this feeling Fuzhou Nighttime Feeling. It is not a cohesive thing, this feeling, it reaches out and bludgeons everything. It is excitement tinged by despair. It is despair heightened by glee. It is partly sexual in nature, though it precedes sexual knowledge. If Fuzhou Nighttime Feeling were a sound, it would be early/mid-nineties R&B.
• Blythe liked to say the only things you can really do in Hong Kong are shop and eat. It is a city that distills life down to its bare essentials.
• You could buy the actual bag, a prototype of the actual bag from the factory that produced it, or an imitation. And if an imitation, what kind of imitation? An expensive, detailed, hand-worked imitation, a cheap imitation made of polyurethane, or something in between? Nowhere else was there such an elaborate gradient between the real and the fake. Nowhere else did the boundaries of real and fake seem so porous.
• Once broken down into ashes, she had explained, the money would transfer into the possession of our ancestral spirits. They would use it to buy things or to bargain with others or to bribe afterlife officials for favors. The afterlife, with its bureaucratic echelons and hierarchies, functioned similarly to the government. Nothing turned your way unless you took matters into your own hands.
• She’d always wanted a Burberry trench, so I burned her one of those too. I burned her a Coach satchel. She loved Coach; she liked most classic American brands, their clean lines. I burned her some Ralph Lauren slacks. As the pièce de résistance, I burned her some Clinique Dramatically Different Moisturizing Lotion. Clinique anything, I burned.
• Genevieve had made her dulce de leche as a special treat. She had been boiling cans of condensed milk in a Dutch oven, because if you boiled this stuff long enough, it turned into a nutty brown, tooth-numbingly sweet caramel taffy. We dipped saltine crackers into it. Around the fire, our tipsy thoughts cast large shadows.
• The internet is the flattening of time. It is the place where the past and the present exist on one single plane. But proportionally, because the present calcifies into the past, even now, even as we speak, perhaps it is more accurate to say that the internet almost wholly consists of the past. It is the place we go to commune with the past.
• I never totally forget the past because I’m seeing it on my Facebook wall every day. You can never reinvent yourself because your social media identity is set.
• Ashley’s eyes were now closed, as if she were in a deep slumber. She lay absolutely still, a sleeping beauty, the soft, submissive center of some fairy tale, a piece of linty candy left on the floor in her princess dress.
• An entire office building sat vacant, leased out as a supporting platform for billboards. It was a dream space, a collision of brand worlds, floating in a vacuum. Sitting in the passenger’s seat, with that hypnotic red Coca-Cola sign winking at us, I knew that I was going to be with Jonathan.
• If you are an individual employed by a corporation or an institution, he said, then the odds are leveraged against you. The larger party always wins. It can’t see you, but it can crush you.
• There’s the Alternative Bible, featuring a blank cover and packaged with Sharpie markers, for the alt-Christian teens to decorate however they want. Then, in the center booth, there’s the showstopper, the Bible Handbag, a portable Bible enveloped in the customized front compartment of a Coach-like satchel, for the housewives to show off at study groups and prayer circles.
• He shook his head. Are you sure you don’t want a Xanax? You’re shaking.
  I can’t take one because I don’t know how it’ll affect the baby.
• Or, at least, I couldn’t work in Bibles forever. I’d go crazy. I couldn’t keep having nightmares of thin Bible paper ripping on web presses, I couldn’t keep explaining to clients the working conditions of Chinese laborers, things that I didn’t understand myself, I couldn’t keep converting yuan to dollars, the exchange rates wildly fluctuating, flailing like a drowning swimmer.
• Things were different in Art. The clients weren’t so fixated on the bottom line. They wanted the product to be beautiful. They cared about the printing, color reproduction, the durability of a good sewn binding, and they were willing to pay more for it, alter their publication schedule for it. They donated to nonprofits that advocated against low-wage factories in South Asian countries, even as they made use of them, a move that showed a sophisticated grasp of global economics.
• The single heroine, usually white, romantic in her solitude. In those movies, there is almost always this power-walk shot, in which she is shown striding down some Manhattan street, possibly leaving work during rush hour at dusk, the traffic blaring all around and the buildings rising around her. The city was empowering. Even if a woman doesn’t have anything, the movies seemed to say, at least there is the city. The city was posited as the ultimate consolation.
• It was summer when they arrived at Salt Lake Valley. The beauty of the land, surrounded by vast mountains and pines and lakes, entranced Brigham Young. The canyon rocks, large and cathedral-like, were patterned with streams of white where water once coursed. In early settler photographs of the West, all streams of water—rivers, brooks, waterfalls—looked like milk. Between the motion of the water and the long exposure times of early cameras, the land once looked as if it were lactating.
• * Upon seeing Utah for the first time, Tarkovsky remarked that now he knew Americans were vulgar because they filmed westerns in a place that should only serve as backdrop to films about God.
• 89: Though her husband had kept his opinions to himself, one night he had spoken passionately about democracy. Every system has its problems, he argued. But any government that granted its people freedom of speech, freedom of protest, showed respect for its citizens. It was the most idealistic she had ever seen him.
• * Her homesickness eased in department stores, supermarkets, wholesale clubs, superstores, places of unparalleled abundance. The solution was shopping, Zhigang observed. He was not trying to be reductive.
• It would become an important ritual, the one routine that granted her a sense of control. She practically invented her own life in America by praying, she liked to say. <> Her prayers began as requests, sometimes bargains. She prayed to be swiftly reunited with her daughter.
• She thought that maybe that serenity was inherited from my father, but it was actually, I wanted to say, a quality owed entirely to her. It had to do with the way she managed our days, so steady and constant and regulated. I have looked for that constancy everywhere. <> Then she was gone, moved to America, and I was transported to live in another part of Fuzhou, with my grandmother and grandfather
• On my second day in America, she ran out of the room in tears after I angrily demanded that she buy me a pack of colored pencils. You’re not you! she sputtered between sobs, which brought me to a standstill. She couldn’t recognize me. That’s what she told me later, that this was not the daughter she had last seen. Being too young, I didn’t know enough to ask: But what did you expect? Who am I supposed to be to you? <> But if I was unrecognizable to her, she was also unrecognizable to me. In this new country, she was disciplinarian, restrictive, prone to angry outbursts, easily frustrated, so fascist with arbitrary rules that struck me, even as a six-year-old, as unreasonable.
• She grabbed my arm and led me down the hallway of our tiny apartment, and into the bathroom. In the bathroom, she ordered me to kneel, fully clothed, at the head of the bathtub, the drain between my knees. She said that such a self-nullifying act of pretending to be homeless could only be punished by another self-nullifying act. I would have to be nullified twice over.
• Both of my parents talked to themselves in English routinely, reenacting conversations with American acquaintances, colleagues, the car wash attendant, the grocery cashier, while they mindlessly washed the dishes or vacuumed or washed their faces in the bathroom. They were performing their Americanness, perfecting it to a gleaming hard veneer to shield over their Chinese inner selves.
• But when we moved here to Salt Lake, he added, your mom and I went to that buffet restaurant, Chuck-A-Rama. I had never had fried chicken before. And I thought, this is better. Fried chicken is better. <> My father rarely spoke of the past, and perhaps it was only after having officialized his severance from China that he felt free to speak openly of his life there.
• Whenever I couldn’t sleep, I would torture myself by creating a completely hypothetical Bible production scenario to troubleshoot. I would calculate the cost of using Swiss Bible paper in place of the Chinese paper that the client insisted we buy, should the latter prove too flimsy to prevent ink from bleeding to the other side, the Psalms obscuring the Proverbs, Matthew contradicting Mark, Peter preempting John. I would estimate the time this theoretical setback would delay the production schedule, then the shipment schedule.
• Nan Goldin: When they laughed, they threw their heads back to reveal crooked, yellowed teeth. The city back then was almost bankrupt. Day and night seemed indistinguishable, the dividing line between them membranic. The party spectacles gave way to hospital scenes gave way to funeral tableaux. The AIDS epidemic seemed to strike overnight.
• a copy of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency under my mattress. So many of the people depicted seemed freakish or other in some way; they didn’t fit in. But that didn’t matter, the photographs seemed to say. What mattered was, they styled and remade themselves in the way they wanted to be seen. They inhabited themselves fully. They made me want to move to New York. Then I’d really be somewhere, I had thought, inhabiting myself.
• Leisure, the problem with the modern condition was the dearth of leisure. And finally, it took a force of nature to interrupt our routines. We just wanted to hit the reset button. We just wanted to feel flush with time to do things of no quantifiable value, our hopeful side pursuits like writing or drawing or something, something other than what we did for money.
• The reigning theory, first disseminated by a prominent doctor in the Huffington Post, was that the new strain of fungal spores had inadvertently developed within factory conditions of manufacturing areas, the SEZs in China, where spores fed off the highly specific mixture of chemicals.
• They were mostly European visitors, from lesser-known countries such as Malta and Estonia, who were taking advantage of the drastically reduced hotel rates, reduced everything rates.
• * But Occupy Wall Street lost its glow pretty quickly. At first a media darling, it became a hot-button debate issue in editorials and cable news shows. In light of the rapid dissemination of Shen Fever, the movement was deemed decadent and out of touch. The images of young, healthy protesters chanting, not wearing their masks so their voices could be heard more loudly, only seemed to enrage the public.
• I stood over the sink and eased the thing into my mouth. It was too big. His teeth were not my teeth. I looked at myself, my freakish, grotesque self, a mouthful of metal and plastic jutting out, and knew that I was alone. <> I spit the retainer out. I washed it, filled the mug with fresh mouthwash, and placed it back in the medicine cabinet. I thought, absurdly, that I’d keep his retainer fresh, for when he returned.
• He compliments you when he wants to control you. He doesn’t see you. It doesn’t mean he’s not a person. It doesn’t mean he’s not vulnerable. In certain moments, he’s just vulnerable enough that you feel sympathy for him. You make excuses for him, often to yourself. You think that if you just work with him a little, then eventually things will get better. Even if he makes you pray, or breaks your iPhone, or makes you shoot at fevered. You think things will be different, more comfortable once you arrive at the Facility. But he doesn’t work that way. Or you wouldn’t have ended up locked up in a cell.
• I opened Outlook, which showed no new emails. I typed up an email to Michael Reitman and Carole, with the subject line elevator malfunction, that detailed my morning’s travails and the steps I took to implement a solution. I wrote that I would let them know of any updates. It was satisfying to finally execute a task, but the satisfaction was fleeting.
• vegetation was already taking over; the most prodigious were the fernlike ghetto palms,... They are deciduous suckering plants that originated in China, were cultivated in European gardens during the chinoiserie trend before gardeners became wise to their foul-smelling odors, and were introduced to America in the late 1700s. They have lived on this land almost since the formation of this country.
• I looked at the photo on my phone. It was a former carriage horse, with its blinders still on, and a harness decorated with bells, jingling with every trot. Once enlisted to give tourists carriage rides around Central Park, it was now free. I wanted to show someone, for someone to marvel at this with me, but there was no one left in the office.
• There was a haunted look about all of these places. Ambling through midtown, I thought of the Robert Polidori photographs of Chernobyl and Pripyat, a ghost town that formerly housed the nuclear-plant workers. Or the Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre images of Detroit, the images of abandoned auto plants and once-grand theaters. And the Seph Lawless images of the vacant, decrepit shopping malls that closed after the 2008 crash.
• Visitors trickled in to NY Ghost. Overwhelmingly, they were from Kihnu, Iceland, Bornholm, and other cold-climate islands I had never heard of, where the fever had not reached. They requested photos and updates of their favorite places. It was as if they still couldn’t believe New York was breaking down, and needed confirmation. Everywhere else could fall apart, but not New York. Its glossy, reflective surfaces and moneyed environments seemed invincible. Even after 9/11, even after the attempted bombings, even after the blackouts and the hurricanes and the rising waters due to global warming. <> I have always lived in the myth of New York more than in its reality. It is what enabled me to live there for so long, loving the idea of something more than the thing itself. But toward the end, in those weeks of walking and taking pictures, I came to know and love the thing itself.
• * The subsequent post was a thirty-second video of the saleslady folding T-shirts. I tried to show it from a distance; I didn’t want the video to be too graphic. Half her jaw was missing. But the way she folded each garment, with an economy of movement, never breaking pace, generated a sense of calm and ease.
• I took a three-hole punch from the copy room and heaved it repeatedly at the glass, which slowly splintered, cracking open as it fissured. When it finally came down, I took all the food items, a fox stealing hen eggs. I rifled through abandoned desks and found chocolate bars, microwavable Kraft mac and cheese,
• Above me, cut into the ceiling, was a skylight. In all the years I’d worked there, I’d never noticed it, and now that the city no longer lit up as brilliantly with electricity, I could see the stars. They were so bright and clear that the sight of them felt astringent against my tired eyes.
• For a long time, I just lie there. My heart beats so hard I feel it in my fingertips.
• * I’ve just never heard you use the term plausible deniability in real life before.
  May you live long enough to see how little your children think of you.
  I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just strange now, how you speak perfect English.
  Well, I can’t communicate with you in your terrible Chinese, she deadpans. Anyway. She gets up. Be careful.
  As she is about to leave, she turns back. If you do manage to escape, then it will be a long time before I see you.
• Trying to talk myself out of my job felt like trying to justify an extravagant purchase I couldn’t actually afford.
• * Even if it is a secondhand familiarity, it is a familiarity all the same. As if all of the stories Jonathan told of his years in Chicago, while we lay drowsing in bed, had seeped into my own memories. Right before sleep when the brain is at its most porous and absorbs everything and weeps chemicals indiscriminately, I must have been deep in his reminiscing, his intricate, lacelike memories inlaid in me. I have been here in another lifetime.
• The first place you live alone, away from your family, he said, is the first place you become a person, the first place you become yourself.
• To live in a city is to take part in and to propagate its impossible systems. To wake up. To go to work in the morning. It is also to take pleasure in those systems because, otherwise, who could repeat the same routines, year in, year out?

Reading Stephanie Foo's account of her "burnout of my own", I'm greatly impressed by her work ethic and journalist skills.

• I’ve waited for that mature, elevated calm, but my thirtieth birthday was months ago, and if anything, I care more than ever. I care about shopping cart placement and plastic in the oceans and being a good listener. I care about how I seem to fuck everything up all the time. I care and I care, and I hate myself for it.
• Complex PTSD. The difference between regular PTSD and complex PTSD is that traditional PTSD is often associated with a moment of trauma. Sufferers of complex PTSD have undergone continual abuse—trauma that has occurred over a long period of time, over the course of years. Child abuse is a common cause of complex PTSD
• * The more I read, the more every aspect of my personhood is reduced to deep diagnostic flaws. I hadn’t understood how far the disease had spread. How complete its takeover of my identity was. The things I want. The things I love. The way I speak. My passions, my fears,
• To revisit my story, one that has until now relied on lies of omission, perfectionism, and false happy endings. I need to stop being an unreliable narrator.
• Then my father got a perfect 1600 on the SATs. Back then, this score signaled academic virtuosity. That 1600 was his ticket out of poverty and out of Malaysia. His older sister, who’d married well, loaned him the money to apply to colleges in the United States. He got into every single school, and every college offered him a full ride.
• _There can only be one “first.” You are still writing too much “Then.” Then I went on a ferris wheel. Then I played two frog games. Try to use other words. And I did it well. Very well. Not good! <> Then she slapped a large grade at the top: C-minus.
• as I read through it now, it appears her mission miscarried. I have no recollection of the Santa Cruz trip, or this lion dance, or that trip to the beach in Mendocino. The only thing I remember vividly is that clear plastic ruler on my palm.
• The other girls leaned into their embraces. My mother did not touch me but stood alone and wept loudly. She cried all the time in the privacy of our home—ugly, bent-in-half sobs—but she never fell apart in public, and the sight alarmed me. <> If it hurt her so much for me to grow up, I wouldn’t. That moment determined my actions for the next few years: I did not tell her when I got my period
• * Do you know how competitive you were during Pictionary? You got upset when other people didn’t know what you were drawing, like a big baby. Everyone felt uncomfortable. Everyone was staring at you. I wanted to die watching you. I wanted to say, ‘That is not my daughter.’ ” <> It felt like I’d sat up quickly in a top bunk and thwacked my head on the ceiling. Now? Really? Of all times, after a mother-daughter bonding trip?
• * Please. My feelings didn’t matter. They were pointless. If I felt all those soft, mushy feelings, if I really thought about how messed up it was that my mother threatened to kill me on a regular basis, could I wake up and eat breakfast with her every day? Could I sit on the couch at night and cuddle her to keep her warm? No. <> If I took up all that space with my feelings, what space could I maintain for hers? Hers were more important. Because hers had greater stakes.
• But I was still a child. I could not survive in a world where I simply fought, negotiated, and worked toward perfection. I needed play. I needed release. So I handled that like I handled everything else. I made the time for it. All it required was popping Sudafed before I went to bed—baby meth, to keep me awake.
• I was furious. I spent my whole life being vigilant, trying to preserve my mother’s tenuous sanity and hold together their marriage. So this felt almost insulting. How could my father be so careless? Still, I had this under control. I made myself the primary account holder on AOL and changed his parental controls. Now he could only look at content appropriate for a thirteen-year-old boy.
• I loved the language, which I can wield like a native. Its elegant conciseness (Can lah!), its phalanx of exclamations (Alamak! Aiyoyo! Aiyah! Walao eh!), the many languages it steals from (Malay: Tolong! Cantonese: Sei lor! Tamil: Podaa!), its fun, puzzling grammar (So dark! On the light one! Wah, like that ah?).
• “It’s simple,” she said. “Your dad is the eldest son in the family. And you are his firstborn child. So naturally, you are the favorite.” This sounded enough like something out of an Amy Tan novel for me to believe it.
• * “When the sky falls, use it as a blanket,” Auntie repeated to me. “Big things, make small. Small things, make nothing. When someone wrongs you, never keep it in your heart. Let it go. Smile through your tears. Swallow your pain.”
• Before the divorce, my father used to call me a pet name, Noi Noi. It’s a sweet diminutive for girl. He never called me that after the divorce. I was not a girl. I was his caretaker.
• * Hatred, I learned quickly, was the antidote to sadness. It was the only safe feeling. Hatred does not make you cry at school. It isn’t vulnerable. Hatred is efficient. It does not grovel. It is pure power.
• Soon, my father and I found ourselves alone in this world, and our simmering hatred had nowhere to go but toward each other.
• * I had faced death so many times before that I knew the feeling well. At a certain point, your body gives up on wild, animal panic and instead settles into a foreboding calm. You accept the end. You lose hope. And then, with hope, goes sanity. <> That’s how I found myself in his room in the middle of the night, standing above his bed... It shames me to admit that threatening his life felt…satisfying. To hold so much power. To feel so much control. He squirmed, and for the first time in forever, I was not afraid.
• This was how I discovered the power of journalism—not just as a force to right wrongs and change the world, but as a force that turned my anguished brain into a functioning machine... I liked that journalism was a puzzle. You lay out your evidence and order it from most important to least, the inverted pyramid a force against woeful attention spans and chaos. I could take feelings and injustices and even tragedies and figure out a way to shape them all into something purposeful. Something controlled.
• I pulled many extremely stupid and offensive stunts. For one story, I wore a nude bodysuit that I drew boobs and a bush on with Sharpie, declared myself a militant feminist, and ran around campus trying to get free things from various cafés as reparations for patriarchal oppression.
• It was only then, in the wake of so much I had demolished, that I realized I had done this to myself, and I had done it because it had been done to me. My anger was a reflection of two people who had self-immolated with their own anger... But how was I to begin letting it go when anger was the force that gave me momentum? My anger was my power. It was what protected me. Without it, wouldn’t I be sad and naked?
• * The next time I was at a taqueria, some drunk guy cut in front of me, demanded food, then meandered away, oblivious. My whole body burned with the desire to yell, to call him pathetic, rude, bald. Not doing so felt like leaving a chunk of rice at the bottom of the bowl, like dipping out without paying the bill—unfinished business, a miscarriage of justice. And yet. What would it accomplish? I let it go. I strong-armed myself into normalcy.
• Resilience, according to the establishment, is not a degree of some indeterminable measure of inner peace. Resilience is instead synonymous with success. <> Which of course made me resilient as fuck. Like a good Protestant American, I continued to save myself through work.
• One of these men was a guy who loved cyberpunk and postapocalyptic fiction. (It was San Francisco, after all, and my childhood sci-fi obsessions had transformed me into a dystopian dream girl.)
• * I wrung my body out like a towel, twisting both ends with red fists and sinking my teeth into it, gritting out, “It’s fine it’s fine it’s fine,” until one day, I woke up and there would be a new accolade on my shelf, a new accomplishment I could never have dreamed of, and then—finally—it would be fine. It’d be perfect. For that day. Or an hour. And then tendrils of the dread started peeking into the corners of my vision. And I had to start all over again.
• New York: They actually were indifferent if you were merely normal. Everyone had their job and their side project and their speaking circuit. They all wore overpriced black sack dresses and geometric statement jewelry.
• So I started scrolling through Twitter. It was like swimming through kelp, painfully pushing my way past apocalyptic predictions by talking heads and stupid hot takes on even stupider tweets from our president, searching desperately for the respite of a cat video. <> Cat with Roomba. I began to be placated. Cat with owl. I felt merely dead inside instead of incomprehensibly sad. Cat reunited with its owner. Well, fuck. Tears again. Back to the drawing board.
• In time, I learned that putting white supremacists on the radio was emotional terrorism for both myself and listeners of color, and it actively aided the KKK’s agenda. But it seemed like raging racial injustice was the only thing my bosses wanted to hear about. They were no longer interested in my pitches about human joys and foibles if they didn’t include a contrarian political angle.
• joy seeping out of the bar with a butter-yellow glow. The disconnect was painted in vibrant relief. Maybe other people were angry about the state of the world, but in real life, they were laughing about television shows... They were remembering to call people back. Everyone was…generally okay. If I possessed the anxiety-and-depression combo meal everyone else had, then why was I the only one crying on the subway every morning?
• * But it was the hyper-specific ones that freaked me out, like the idea that C-PTSD patients spend their lives in “relentless search for a savior.” ... Every time I met someone new who seemed wise and stable and kind, I wondered if they might be the answer to things, if they might be the new best friend who’d finally crack the code, the one who would make me feel loved. I thought this was a weird but very personal trait of mine. And this whole time it had been a medical symptom.

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• But after ten years of constant work, buying the least expensive entrées, and thrift-store shopping, I had finally saved enough money to not work for several months. At last, a burnout of my very own.
• but the faceless arbiters of mental health behind the DSM—a group of psychiatrists I envision as a society of hooded figures chanting around a sacrificial child star—decided that it was too similar to PTSD. There was no reason to add a “C,” no need for a distinction between the two.
• * What we might think of as emotional outbursts—anxiety, depression, lashing out in anger—aren’t always just petty, emotional failings. They may be reflexes designed to protect us from things our brain has encoded as threats. And these threatening inputs are what many people call triggers.
• * here’s what makes complex PTSD uniquely miserable in the world of trauma diagnoses: It occurs when someone is exposed to a traumatic event over and over and over again—hundreds, even thousands of times—over the course of years. When you are traumatized that many times, the number of conscious and subconscious triggers bloats, becomes infinite and inexplicable. If you are beaten for hundreds of mistakes, then every mistake becomes dangerous. If dozens of people let you down, all people become untrustworthy. The world itself becomes a threat.
• This was the most disorienting and upsetting idea that emerged from my reading: the idea that C-PTSD was baked into my personality, that I didn’t know where my PTSD stopped and I began. If C-PTSD was a series of personality traits, then was everything about my personality toxic?
• Scientists have learned that stress is literally toxic. Stress chemicals like cortisol and adrenaline surging through our bodies are healthy in moderation—you wouldn’t be able to get up in the morning without a good dose of cortisol. But in overwhelming quantities, they become toxic and can change the structure of our brains. Stress and depression wear our bodies out. And childhood trauma affects our telomeres.
• The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk writes about a form of therapy called EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It’s a strange process reminiscent of hypnosis, where a patient revisits past traumas while moving their eyes left and right.
• One theory is that EMDR mimics the way the brain processes memories during REM sleep. Other research suggests that these eye movements tax our short-term memory, dimming the painful vibrancy of past experiences and making them easier to revisit with a sense of clarity. Whether or not either of these theories is true, many studies keep showing real results: Somehow, this weird process is surprisingly effective in helping patients recover from trauma.
• “It’s interesting you say that you aren’t dissociated,” Eleanor said carefully. “When you describe some terrible things being done to you, you have a remarkably flat affect when talking about them.”
• It’s not just about finding the most traumatic memory you can possibly dredge up. In fact, some might argue that starting C-PTSD treatment by diving into the back of your closet and chasing out your scariest, most deeply buried skeleton is a terrible idea. You could find a murderous clown in the storm drain of your life, and he could start haunting your everyday existence.
• * But my childhood abuse was old hat. Still, perhaps there were less-cited abusive moments somewhere in my skull, the B sides of my trauma history. Perhaps these would hurt. <> On the train ride home, my brain fumbled through traumatic events like a hand in a junk drawer, pulling out a stapler, then a fly swatter.
• Mommy Dearest: The part of the wire hanger scene that was most familiar was the very end, after Joan leaves Christina alone in the bathroom. Christina sits there, still, in quiet shock. While you are getting the shit kicked out of you, there isn’t much room for injustice or disbelief, just survival. How do you calm the monster? Manage their rage? But in this silence, after it’s over, that’s when the sorrow finds you. “Jesus Christ,” Christina whispers to herself, and I recalled multiple perfect reflections of this moment. That quiet slice of time you get when the monster retreats and you have a minute to survey the wreckage—the powdered soap everywhere, the lace dresses strewn all over the floor—and sit with the absolute what the fuck of your life before you have to pull it all back together, clean up the mess, and pretend that everything is fine.
• I’ve always said there are forest people and desert people. Forest people are nurturing and fertile, but they have a tendency to hide behind their branches. I’m a desert person. Hard and acerbic and difficult to endure, but honest. You always know what you’re getting in the desert because there isn’t anywhere to hide.
• I had recalled that moment of abuse two hundred times and not once had I ever cried. I never flinched. I always felt calm all over, a flat, barren nothing. Past therapists told me many times, “The abuse was not your fault.” And I felt that windless chill and responded, “Yeah, sure. I know that.”... But this had been something else... I didn’t just understand the weight of my abuse logically. I felt it, like a blade through flesh, like a bone popping out of place. I felt it like a lover saying it’s not going to work: sharp, immediate, and terrifying. I actually felt, with searing clarity, the horror of what happened to me—maybe for the first time ever. I felt how tremendously sad it was that I was forced to make my parents feel loved at such a young age.
• There is a difference between knowing and understanding. I had known that this wasn’t my fault. EMDR unlocked the gate to the next realm, toward understanding. The difference is one between rote memorization and true learning. Between hypothesis and belief. Between prayer and faith. It seems obvious now—how can there be love without faith?
  And the second thing I learned was: My parents didn’t love me.
• If I’d acknowledged these feelings earlier, I could have asked for the attention I wanted. But instead, I felt that hollow, dry, fine feeling. The same feeling I had when I talked about knives to my throat. The same feeling you get when you have to stop crying, pick up the rag, and finish cleaning up the soap. The silent, soundless expanse.
• Maybe you can hide in the desert after all.
  I may not have United States of Tara levels of dissociation. But it’s now clear I do have my own kind of dissociation, tamer and perhaps more dangerous in its subtlety, because up until now, I’ve been able to ignore the fact that it even existed.
• It was now clear that I had hung a veil up decades ago—a thick white sheet in the back of my mind to keep certain truths from myself.
  The dread was a catchall. It was a colorless amalgamation of feeling because I did not have the tools to tease out the wild knot of my real emotions and needs. The dread was a sliver of light escaping from behind the veil.
  When I used EMDR to move the veil aside, I found: My parents never loved me, and that’s not my fault.
• The books say that in order to stop being a burden, I must learn how to “self-soothe.” I need to learn how to calm my anxieties by myself, without immediately texting everyone in my phone. Therapy and EMDR might eventually work to heal my trauma on a longer timeline. But to ease the searing pain of the present moment, everyone says the first step should be meditation and mindfulness.
• Even though consciously I was completely in the present, my emotions were back in 1997, back when I was a little kid and making a mistake on a spelling test could literally be a matter of life and death. This return was an emotional flashback. <> Beauty After Bruises claims that the way to fix these emotional flashbacks is to ground yourself... Grounding 101 tips: Open your eyes. Put your feet solidly on the floor. Look at your hands and feet. Recognize they are adult hands and feet. Name five things you can see and hear and smell.
• *  I learned that what happened that first day at restorative yoga hadn’t been entirely spiritual.. Instead, my instructor’s techniques happened to be the perfect mechanism to turn down my DMN. <> The default mode network is so called because if you put people into an MRI machine for an hour and let their minds wander, the DMN is the system of connections in their brains that will light up. It’s arguably the default state of human consciousness, of boredom and daydreaming. In essence, our ego.
• In order for the DMN to start whirring, it needs resources to fuel its internal focus. If you’re intently focused on something external—like, say, filling out a difficult math worksheet—the brain simply doesn’t have the resources to focus internally and externally at the same time. So if you’re triggered, you can short-circuit an overactive DMN by cutting off its power source—shifting all of your brain’s energy to external stimuli instead.
• One of my favorites was mindful eating... And there was one mindfulness trick that was like a giant emergency button I could whack in a crisis... : counting colors. I whirled around the room and counted all the red things:
• His invention, holotropic breathwork, is a fancy term for “hyperventilating until the levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide in your body are so whacked-up that you hallucinate.” Some people report having intensely cathartic experiences afterward, akin to those associated with hallucinogens.
• I was approaching “wellness” with the same obsessive, perfectionistic tendencies I’d brought to my job. This was no less disordered than being a workaholic, and the pattern had a distinct echo: moments of intense joy through achievement followed by anxiety over finding my next success. <> I decided to cut down on the number of wellness activities I participated in, keeping only my favorites, the ones that brought me sincere and easy joy.
• These trips were not confetti-strewn party extravaganzas. Instead, they often involved lots of crying and digging through hard truths, coming out on the other side with a clearer lens through which to witness this sublime world.
  But my trip had also shown me that there was one thing that could combat the void for a little while: gratitude. It was the flame that penetrated the darkness, that filled me all the way up. And the only way to keep the flame going was to keep feeding it. <> These acts of generosity kept staying with me. Kept filling the void. <> Like with food—like that one miraculous Pret chicken parmesan wrap—when you take the time to savor the good, you simply need less of it... As Melody Beattie said, “Gratitude turns what we have into enough.”

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• We knew that Filipinos always had good streetwear from 555 Soul; the white girls and hot Viets could hook us up with discounts at Abercrombie; Taiwanese girls went home for the summer and brought back outfits with bows and lace in odd places; and aZn and Mexican girls knew how to apply impeccable eye and lip liner. <> But we also knew that as this unit, we were allowed to borrow from one another: You could bring chana masala to school even if you weren’t Indian
• nobody ever said anything about what must have happened: abuse, sexual assault, the traumas of poverty and war. But even at a young age, without understanding what these things were, we sensed them as we kicked our way through the currents of our day. We could feel it looming somewhere, large and dark beneath everything: our parents’ pain.
• The loss is enormous. An entire childhood’s worth of happiness. The bedrock for a happy life. A smart girl with a gap-toothed grin who conversed easily with strangers at the checkout aisle. Wiped. What a waste. Outside, the birds sing. It is a perfectly warm day, the sky a shameless expanse of blue.
• There was a different lesson that could have been taught about forced assimilation—about Native American boarding schools, “Kill the Indian, and save the man,” Chinese men in San Francisco who were forced to cut their queues. But instead, they taught us to cross-stitch. <> Surely, I think, the racial divide might blind white teachers like Mr. Dries to our plight—immigrants can be very good at blending into the scenery.
• * But from underneath these shreds of doubt, a new woman punches her way to the surface, someone who has read the data. This whole fucking narrative of all of these Asians settling gently into the American dream is bullshit. The facts just don’t add up. You have a community of immigrants and refugees who survived extreme violence—but they don’t believe in mental illness, don’t talk about trauma, don’t allow for feelings or failure, and everyone is just fucking fine? The worst angst here comes from not being able to make an essay sparkle? Come on.
• “Intergenerational trauma, am I right?” “Yaaas, girl, you know!” <> Our laughter is that of relief. My conversation with Yvonne, as dismal as it is, feels so much lighter than my conversations with the other teachers because it is true. Ugly things become uglier in the dark. For once, we don’t have to cushion the truth, massage it into something palatable. We hold that difficult truth, together.
• * I read up on my classmates’ painful family histories: the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Vietnam War, the Korean War, the Cambodian genocide. I realized that my community was built in large part from the wreckage of America’s brutal proxy wars against communism... San Jose is America’s consolation prize for those who lost Saigon and Seoul.
• C Pam Zhang writes in an essay in The New Yorker.[1] She says her parents “depicted their pre-America lives as mere prologue, quickly sketched…. It is far too easy…as the naturalized citizen of a country that tries to kick dirt over its bloody history…to see only the castle on the hill and not the thickets of bone we trod through to arrive at it.”
• But under Japanese occupation, the mines closed entirely...  To avoid suspicion and harassment—and to make a little bit of money on the side—my great-grandmother bought clothes for cheap from grave robbers, who dug up corpses, looking for gold. She and her daughters unraveled the dead people’s clothing, spooled the thread, and used it to sew new clothing…and make Japanese flags. She sold these flags back to the Japanese soldiers—the World War II equivalent of undocumented immigrants selling Trump hats on Canal Street.
• my great-grandmother’s history was worth our remembrance and our respect because of her hard work, her sacrifices, and, most of all, her unfathomable endurance. It made perfect sense to me later in life when I discovered that the Chinese word for endurance is simply the word knife on top of the word heart. You walk around with a knife in your heart. You do it with stoicism. This is the apex of being.
• * But the truth was something better than that: I had been seen. My family had seen me. And they loved me enough to orchestrate a grand performance that had spanned decades and involved my entire family. All those years of “Ho gwaai, ho gwaai. You’re so well-behaved. You’re such a good girl.” At first, those lines were crafted to show my mother that I was deserving of love. That didn’t work. But perhaps they were also endeavoring to show me.
• But something about this didn’t sit right with me—if my desire for accountability and acknowledgment was entitled, did that mean disempowered people did not deserve justice? Still, as I hung up the phone, my family’s voices scolded me: “Ah girl. You are just too American.”
• Viet Thanh Nguyen writes that immigrant communities like San Jose or Little Saigon in Orange County are examples of purposeful forgetting through the promise of capitalism: “The more wealth minorities amass, the more property they buy, the more clout they accumulate, and the more visible they become, the more other Americans will positively recognize and remember them. Belonging would substitute for longing; membership would make up for disremembering.”
• I learned that Auntie and my grandmother had not just survived World War II, as I’d previously thought. * There was another war they lived through, a secret war that history would prefer to forget. <> Under Japanese occupation of Malaysia during WWII, a Communist guerrilla force grew in the jungle. With half a million members, they called themselves the Malayan National Liberation Army, or MNLA... After the British came into power yet again, the MNLA waged an all-out war against them for twelve years. But the British never called it a war. They dubbed the conflict the “Malayan Emergency,” because calling it a war would have meant that insurers wouldn’t cover losses for their many assets—tin mines... Britain’s success in this war was actually what persuaded America to go to war with Vietnam.
• Like their mother before them, my grandmother and Auntie became the main breadwinners of their household. And like their mother, they tried starting up illegal gambling operations to survive.
• * Did the thousands of dollars he spent on me allow him to pay off his sins? But I went to a state school, I tell myself. But I graduated in two years. But I didn’t take money from him after graduation. I count and recount, as if I can nickel and dime my way out of having to love him.
• It took a couple of days for it to hit me: an unbearable understanding that changed everything. This time, I am the secret.
• I am the same as my long-lost half sister, her existence so cobwebby that nobody in my family can even remember her name. I am my grandparents’ jail time and my mother’s birth parents. I am my mother’s opaque childhood, her missing siblings. I am the great-uncle who cross-dressed, whom my aunts used to peek at beneath the floorboards to catch a glimpse of him putting on lipstick. I am the great-aunt who maybe had a female lover, the one nobody likes to talk about.
  I am the trauma you bury away. I am the lie you hold under your tongue, the thing you bury, vanish, erase, the thing you can almost always pretend is forgotten as long as you don’t touch it...  Their lives appear whole. But only if you forget I exist.
  I am blood and sin. I am the sum total of my parents’ regrets. I am their greatest shame.
• estrangement: “I don’t think it brought anyone joy. It didn’t make people happy to have to do it. It was just necessary.
• He was trying to be quiet, hoping the growing awkwardness would force me to eventually feel so itchy that I’d fill in the space with my talking. I knew this technique because I used it all the time with my interview subjects.
• But I took a deep breath, swallowed hard, and leapt in. I embraced my February self. And then I tried to shift to embracing my current self, which was harder. To be held by my own consciousness. I pushed through the wall. It felt like curling up in a tulip. Like throwing a bull’s-eye and winning the prize I’d always wanted. Foreign. Wholesome. Good... Love yourself. Ah, there it was. For the first time without the help of hallucinogens: unconditional self-love.
• Self-parenting exercises taught me to slowly rebuild healthy self-talk. But it must be said: Even though I know reparenting has helped dozens of my friends and acquaintances, almost everyone has told me it’s exhausting. Reparenting takes time, and concentration, and calmness.

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• Symptomatically, men with PTSD are more likely to exhibit anger, paranoia, and an exaggerated startle response. Women are more likely to be avoidant and have mood and anxiety disorders. Women generally focus on regulating their emotions, while men focus on solving problems.
• * As I read through, a comment popped up on the screen. Dr. Ham was adding notes to the transcript!... I loved this form of therapy. If Dr. Ham had called me out for that in the moment, I would’ve gotten defensive or confused. But something about editing this on a Google Doc gave it a pleasant distance. It gave our interaction objectivity—laid out the truth for everyone to see so there was no “he said, she said.” And it turned my therapy into an interesting project to investigate rather than a depressing way to obsess over my flaws... This felt the same—we were editing my trauma out of the conversation. It thrilled my journalistic sensibilities.
• So often, past therapists I’d encountered had presented themselves as a kind of all-knowing, all-seeing Wizard of Oz... In contrast, Dr. Ham was only too happy to give me a tour of the engine room. <> “I was tracking your facial expressions here and realized I was floundering,” he commented at one point. At another point, where he had told me a small personal story, he noted: “I gave a self-disclosure to empathize with you on the pain of growing.”
• “In my mind, the most helpful thing for you is to be reconnected with another person. Self-regulation is a very insular thing. That’s just survival. Like, ‘I’m not going to actually learn how to be connected to you, but at least I’m going to be able to regulate how upset I get from you.’... But what if instead you were in this state where you could ask, ‘Who are you? What do you need from me right now? And what do I need from you?’ ”
• * This was Dr. Ham’s whole theory: that because of its repetitive nature, complex trauma is fundamentally relational trauma. In other words, this is trauma caused by bad relationships with other people—people who were supposed to be caring and trustworthy and instead were hurtful... The only way you could heal from relational trauma, he figured, was through practicing that relational dance with other people... We had to go out and practice maintaining relationships in order to reinforce our shattered belief that the world could be a safe place.
• I thought about this for a moment. “You mean…I was only taught how to apologize whenever there’s a problem and say, ‘I’m sorry. I’m so fucked-up.’ ” <> “Exactly. You don’t know how to apologize by making it a two-way repair.”
• Dr. Ham advocates for what the Dalai Lama calls “emotional disarmament—to see things realistically and clearly without the confusion of fear or rage.” For every narrow, fear-based C-PTSD reading, Dr. Ham said, there is a wider truth—layers and layers of truths. Of course it isn’t possible to always know that entire truth, because the people we love might not even be aware of that truth themselves. What is important is to approach all of these interactions with curiosity for what that truth is, not fear.
• Dr. Ham would try unsuccessfully to stifle his chortles, and he’d call me stupid. For some reason—which I can only attribute to Asians! That’s how they are!—I would not take this personally and would instead yell back,
• “Justice is the firmest pillar of good government,” after all, and justice meant people had to pay for their mistakes. When something went wrong, there had to be fault. There had to be blame. There had to be pain.
  Now I knew I was wrong. Punishment didn’t make things better. It mucked things up even more.
  The father’s self-punishment did not grant him his daughter’s forgiveness. It did not whip his sins out of him. Instead, it removed him from his family by isolating him in a prison of self-loathing.
• tense fights, when they dragged me out of bed in the middle of the night to arrange some premature custody agreement... maybe I was just tired. So when my mother asked, “Who do you love more?” I answered, “I guess Mommy. Because she punishes me more. So she must love me more.”
• “I’m feeling worried that you’re shifting the attention to me because you don’t want to burden me with your problems. But I just want to say that your problems aren’t a burden—I’m so curious about what’s going on. My life is so boring right now, and I want to spend time learning about you!”... she started sharing the tough stuff she was going through and let me comfort her. I felt privileged to be able to hold space for a friend I love.
• * he had taken to smiling at me and saying, “You feel curious today.” He might as well have been telling me that I was his favorite patient. It was a glowing compliment... But more and more, I am curious enough to ask the magic question: “What do you need?” These four words open doors and break down walls.
• Being healed isn’t about feeling nothing. Being healed is about feeling the appropriate emotions at the appropriate times and still being able to come back to yourself. That’s just life.”
• “Pain is about feeling real, appropriate, and valid hurt when something bad happens. Suffering is when you add extra dollops to that pain. You’re feeling bad about feeling bad.”
• * With freezer trucks full of dead bodies parked outside morgues and Asian women being kicked, burned by acid, and shot, my PTSD transformed from a disability into a superpower. Because objectively, PTSD is an adaptation, a mechanism our genius bodies evolved to help us survive. <> All of a sudden, I was no longer hypervigilant. I was just vigilant.
• Siegle told me, “As far as we can tell with complex PTSD, in really stressful situations, you’ve got this coping skill that allows the prefrontal cortex to just shut off some of our evolutionary freak-out mechanisms and instead have high levels of prefrontal activity. So our bodies stop reacting.” <> In other words, in some moments of intense stress, we are super-duper good at dissociation.
• Rage will always coat the tip of my tongue. I will always walk with a steel plate around my heart. My smile will always waver among strangers and my feet will always be ready to run. In the past few years, my joints have continued to rust and swell. I cannot transfuse the violence out of my blood.

和以前看过的司马拆迁的文风格好像不太一样。这是发生在温哥华的恋爱故事，靓仔喜欢上了女仔的大哥。都是很好的人，生活也优渥，所以爱起来可以全心投入，二话不说追到泰国去——有时候就挺需要这种爱情比天大，空中楼阁的文艺文。

>>   陈米雪看见她握着同款手机的大哥，穿白色衫，头发留到肩膀，不染不烫不加发蜡，黑亮自然。陈一平怕她觉得他过时，一直有做发型，左侧打薄过，压在耳后。他有热爱水上运动的阳光肤色，一路走来，比她更格格不入，闲适得好像一阵吹进光怪陆离夜晚的白色海风。

    陈一平低头笑，幽暗转变的光线里，他一笑，他对面的人就好似眼前亮一亮。他拿出钱包，冲对方扬下巴。“赌一盘啊，你赢我请你这里所有‘朋友’饮料。现金全给你。输也不差，有个可爱小女生想请你喝奶茶。”

男生比她大四、五岁，像冻手的冰块那样硬邦邦的好看。

   他的手臂手腕在邓特风眼前一晃而过，皮肤被晒成有光泽的浅浅蜂蜜色，好像真是黏喉咙的蜜糖，邓特风咽喉都发紧，他点点头。

   他说：“上次你可以掉头走掉，或者喝完杯奶茶就走。但是你陪她坐足一个半小时。”陈一平端起那杯倒给他他又不喝的水，流畅地碰下邓特风手上咖啡杯。“多谢你。”
    邓特风心里不知变了什么味道，被他碰下杯，却是因为那个小女生。他也喝一口咖啡，藉着嘴里都是苦涩，任 xi_ng 地吐露：“但我还是不开心。”

    那景色太壮观。邓特风吹着桥上的大风，终于试着抬起手臂，松松抱住陈一平的腰。t恤下他的身体在散发热力，好像阳光照耀下的海水，邓特风又清空肺腔，深深地用力地呼吸。

    “不会。”陈一平拖着语气晃晃荡荡地讲。“一般上完我的课，你们都不知道什么叫约会了。”
    邓特风听他说，低着头笑个不停。他笑起来像水晶碰撞，有一种独特剔透的少年感。陈一平乍然回想起，很小的时候，有父母带着去鱼档看盛着蓝水的玻璃缸中五光十色的金鱼。

米雪站在阳台看见楼下邓特风开的车，那车漂亮如同一架光滑流动的钢琴。

他料到江绍昨天知道米雪恋爱，黯然整天，今天会因酸楚积累到阈值而爆炸。    果然，江少一上楼就怨天怨地，几乎要拆房子。

    “你…想勾的那个女孩子，家教严不严？”
    邓特风认真考虑，自信道：“她大哥人很好。”

    他穿深色t恤，牛仔裤。 yi-n 影纵横的宽阔车库内，他的沉默也好似一首日间的钢琴曲，一首夜的诗。米雪的心又被小鹿撞一下，她匆匆点头，淑女地走下车按电梯。

    米雪骂他：“神经病！”牵住了邓特风的手。江绍看着米雪的手和邓特风受惊后的迟钝回握， x_io_ng 口快呕出血来，嘤咛一声，再度倒入陈一平怀抱。

    原本只是同为年轻华裔迷惘一代的点头之交，连对方惯讲中文还是英文都不了解。第一个月底，江少就心高气傲和白人老板闹翻不干，砸烂吉他一走了之。他说再不回头，老板连薪金都想省掉，陈一平坚持要老板开一张写给江绍的支票，否则就正式告他种族歧视请政府仲裁。他拿到支票交给江绍随江绍如何处置，两人都丢了这份暂时的工，收获个十几年的兄弟。

    刚好上船的邓特风看见江绍一屁股坐在陈一平大腿上，陈一平的手指暧昧地贴在江绍唇下巡游。在这一刻，他心里排山倒海像被灌了整吨海水。
    米雪也被这一幕冲击，突然就双手举起包包，劈头盖脸追着江绍砸到露台外面。“叫你占我大哥便宜！叫你占我大哥便宜！站住！”
    落地窗外阳光下，陈一平被夹在当中，终于镇压住还在打闹的两人。邓特风站在窗内靠门处，蓦地觉得自己其实是那对兄妹连密友三人外的局外人。他比不上江绍，在这里有十几年至交好友，一个眼神彼此心知肚明的熟稔，一个电话能要他穿越半个城市去买一份吐司送上。

   五月底的温哥华终日日光，到晚九点，十点才彻底天黑。邓特风对他摇头，在海上，海面风吹起波皱，一片连一片，视野像被蓝色天鹅绒缎铺满，他们在海上，又像被天空罩下的光包围。

   “妈咪保持身材。”邓特风道：“家里茶柜从来只放各种代糖，吃惯了。”
    装作不以为然，心底其实起起伏伏激起一大片波澜。整个人都要化作海里的水天上的云，多好，水被留到海的心里，云又被摆放在天空最显眼地方。

    成百上千的桅杆戳在云中，又倒影入洁净的海水。江绍拿吉他出来弹，拨着弦，米雪竟没有嘲笑他，任他哼童谣一样的歌，邓特风不知那首歌是什么，只听他随便地唱：月亮亮众星伴随，快看看满天星泪。日一对，夜一对，萤火一对对……
    是哄小孩又很悲伤，弦律和字节散落在海风里，落日余晖也投入海平线下。这世界转为黑暗仅需三十秒，再多壮丽华美亦留不住。江绍那里还在唱：夜静静众生伴随……雨细细有风相聚……来一对，回亦一对，落花一对对……问萤火照耀谁，不怕累怕孤独睡……扑翼飞去，在长空里……冰天雪地也一对……

  初恋情侣，就是这样，不知自己要什么，只想傻呆呆抓住什么是旁人眼中看来好的。黑马王子，水晶公主，因为“相衬”或“他/她配得上我”便可以在一起。能共赴一场童话盛筵，又能否在宴会结束十二点后有个好结局，这说不定，全要看缘。

    可这一吻完毕，好像从晃荡迷醉的云端落回尘世，水晶灯下，两人心里都不约而同地滋生一种异样的失落。似乎这根本不是能带给他们欢喜，他们懵懂寻觅的东西。

   江绍拿了罐啤酒，一直没喝。他其实是个很英俊漂亮的男人，眼睛很大很清澈，清澈到眉宇间常有迷惘流露，所以要用特异和花俏来遮掩。

    阿祖眼中，他老大的样子此时好似十四、五岁唇红齿白只懂做功课的呆板少年，又好似穿男友衬衣的怀春少女。
    手上拿的那册漫画写了“古惑仔”，封面是个长发，紧身背心， x_io_ng 口刺青龙纹的肌肉男人。邓特风知道他来，眼也不抬，承认说：“我好像不很看得懂……”...
    邓特风说：“她大哥喜欢。”顿了顿，又严谨地加上两个字：“可能。”
    说到底他只是为一份“可能”。

    他用一支铅笔的浓淡，深浅，做出光与暗，做出大千世界的其他色彩，轻盈奶油一样的肤，柔和的红晕，黑亮葡萄一样的眼睛，偷吃桑葚一样的嘴唇。... 他笔下的人物是她自己，画画的人和看画的人都不该想着用哪些词汇去定义她。这副米雪肖像，唯一不客观的一点或者是那种柔和的笔触。邓特风记得陈一平提到她时的柔和，太执着地想弄清陈一平心中米雪的模样，便不自觉画成这样。

    过十几分钟，陈一平才回：既然要学，就学好它。
    如同一只瓶子被横放，浸泡他内心使得内心如焚的烈酒流走。

    男孩要穷养，女孩要富养。邓特风并不理解这个道理，他可以一丝忸怩也没有地说，他是富养长大的，财富与资源对他来说好像空气一般的无滋无味不功不过察觉不到，但他生活于其中。
    在这个年纪，他对陈一平这个人以及他背后的人生很着迷。好像一个过客的 x_io_ng 膛是一扇圆花窗，望出去能看见宽广的，使他迷惑的另一个世界。那么陌生又那么熟悉。

    胶布下固定两毫米的锐利小针，刺在耳骨里，遵医嘱保留至少一周，据说能安神。结果闹出这场叫人啼笑皆非的误会。邓特风觉得丢脸，猛一个劲闷头饮绿茶，喝到第二杯时茶壶中已经没有水，他揭开壶盖，一时不慎弄到壶盖滚落，悄然无声的店里传来一声陶瓷响，为他们服务的女侍者连忙赶来捡起并道歉。
    邓少爷深呼吸，从未尝试在餐厅这样难堪过，十年的份额都在此用尽。他以前以为，在餐厅尴尬到情愿一走了之是庸俗爱情喜剧才会用的桥段。
    陈一平代他对女侍者说：“不，抱歉。是我们聊得太投入，忘记其他。”...
    邓特风暗自说他坏话，说了几句，却不得不承认他实在让人数落不起来。即使邓特风觉得自己完全是被他“陷害”，若不是被他对住笑那么久……可是能被他笑那么久，虽然尴尬，心底也有种无可言状的喜悦，好像蝴蝶的翅膀一下下扑闪，又像患了要不停打喷嚏到面红耳赤无法呼吸的花粉症。

    这晚甜品是小玻璃樽装的意式芝麻奶冻，兼一片烤得香脆的薄芝麻饼干。
    灰色奶冻上浸一层鲜奶，一饮便会在唇上留奶霜，要伸舌 t-ian 一圈。牛奶上点缀一颗鲜红桑葚，奶冻中可见星星点点黑色芝麻皮，口感却幼滑细嫩，舌尖试不出一丝渣滓。

    他慢半拍地抱着那桶爆米花跟在陈一平身后入电影场，脑袋里空荡荡一片，如同纪录片里，康拉德对小灰鹅做印随行为的实验，灰鹅会摇摇晃晃地排成列，本能地跟随实验者。

    邓特风半抽离于大屏幕地观察着他，屏幕光盛时，他眼睛里如同发光。那是种在没有都市建筑的地方，浩荡湖泊流域，野鸭大雁飞过，深秋夜晚月光下，水面会反映出的银色的光。邓特风不知道的是，这一刻他的眼睛也同样如湖水在发光，淡淡的银光镀在他们身上，洒在他们之间，隔着一个空座位，就像隔着银河。

    那母亲可能贫困领救济，那儿子可能头脑发育不行，身体也已残疾。世上不幸的人那么多，他只是透过跑车车窗审视十秒的公子哥，不知人间几多艰辛。
    邓特风想要亲人，想要玩伴，恰巧陈一平于这两重身份上都表现出色。唯独不是对着他。这一点已经足够他在理清自己的思绪以前，感到惆怅。

陈一平才迟了一会儿，拿着那些可丽饼转头，看见邓特风黑夜里雪白得像会融化，也天真得像会融化的一张脸。
    有一句中文的词，说“众里寻他千百度”。又有一句英文诗，确切的原文已不记得了。——倘若不是记忆骗人，真有这样一句存世，翻译过来，大概是，“繁花之中，我见到你”。...
    陈一平下意识地笑，他怎会知道那些脸皮薄又很倔强的少男在畏惧什么。感情从天而降，落在怀里，就像有倒计时，那个倒数的时刻到了你自然会察觉自己抱着的情愫究竟是什么，但是在一切还不分明的时候，这是个给人隐隐危机预感的定时炸弹。
    叫人怎样不去惧怕，如同被人扼住了脖子。一旦起了征兆就注定要动心，不能中途按下停止键，不得不去爱。
    陈一平有种不对的感觉，心脏被击中，不辨悲喜。

   “这么说了，十年前我们在研究‘为什么人们同居’，现在我们研究‘为什么人们还结婚’，万幸男女关系一直有变化，没人看出我们这领域的研究原地打转。还不叫混饭吃？”

    迈开步几步去到许愿卡处，买了几张。回来时头发被风吹乱，邓特风仅看见他捋遮挡视野的散发时夹在黑发里的手指，和露出的眼睛。他那只眼如有热度，像烟顶一点红火星，可以在心头烫一下刺痛的烙印。陈一平站在灯树旁买许愿卡，侧面被蓝光红光浸透。夜像一块黑玻璃，左蓝右红，巨灯在幕前打两色强光。画面像染了两种由淡到浓颜色的纸，他在湿润的色彩中，五官有种奇异吸引力。
    这是我所画不出的。邓特风想，或者他该去学电影摄影镜头语言，才有勇气有胆量将之描摹。唯保存入胶片，一帧帧细微入理，纤毫毕现，方能留存这样的感觉五分。

    陈一平也觉得奇怪，为什么喜欢整他。找不到有力理由，就一路走一路说服自己，我也是个爱以大欺小的人。家中只有一个小妹，女孩子不能捉弄，这么多年憋坏了。
    他们间的气氛不由变得怪异，好像发酵，空气都在膨胀。两人都被什么力量操纵，不得已就演变成邓特风横冲直撞走在前面，陈一平掉在后面的情景。距离越拉越开，对方是个烧红的铜炉，避之唯恐不及，走在一起会被烫到焦头烂额，碰一碰都要被粘住手，要甩脱还撕下一层皮。
    邓特风走了几十米，在人来人往的商场里感到愧疚。他要我试却没有买，我为什么要朝他发脾气？

    陈一平不知是先隐约察觉出“他喜欢我”场面更糟糕还是“我对他也不排斥”更惨淡。他应该早明白的，那些微妙的瞬间，那些奇异的反应，问题是谁会如此具备自恋倾向认定一个同 xi_ng ，妙龄少女的准男友，有暗恋我的嫌疑。
    这一瞬间，他彻底失去应对的能力。但是他知道绝对不能再跟邓特风这么坐下去，就找个借口先走，说来日再见。总算勉强全身而退，手脚都不协调地平安到家。

    邓特风当然不会知道这些，他只觉得，那花纹仿佛来自于某个小国已被湮没沙化的古代文明。不含任何关于陈一平这个人感情生活的暗示，却有种不该出现在他身上的妖异。
    像一朵颜色暗沉的花，没有花瓣，舞动着花丝，一点一丝地勾动他。缠绕在他身上，散发出熏得人昏沉的香气，在烈日下焦土上展现妩媚。不可理喻，自相矛盾，好似一条温热滑腻的蛇。

    她是他过去的篇章，相当重要的一个章节。要是写一本书，已知下一个章节会与你已写完的部分矛盾，或许比起修改前文，你可以在这里停笔，不要再继续这一条剧情线。中止一段感情有多痛苦，他已经知道，往昔的记忆会变成刀锋来切割心。但避开一种潜在的吸引力，是否是一件简单的事。陈一平想，若是为米雪，他不介意不开始一段还没有开始的感情。

    仍是极简口气，陈一平没有认为这是生硬，他更像是悬浮在空中，亲眼看见邓特风捏着电话，翻来覆去才码出寥寥几个字母。手指在屏幕上，隔空踌躇，反反复复，点不了发出。他要用怎样的勇气发这一条信息，好像做梦梦见背包野营，如此疲惫，还要不断迈步行进找一个可以露宿的地方。陈一平仅是设想就要代他感到沉重。如果感情已经成为一个负担，不如放下背包，返转头吧。

    邓特风陷入无穷无尽的苦闷，应该说那些苦闷像狂 ch_ao 向他眼耳口鼻涌入。他想着我中意他，他却不中意我。或者说他根本不知道我中意他，我想要触碰他的身体。为什么会变成这样，为什么我很难受。在不理解自己时尚且有懵懂甜蜜的愉快，可此时看见了自己的心意，反而既想上前又想逃避，使我无比煎熬。
    他近乎放空地想着心里的话，沉浸在自身的感情里。好像一块海绵吸了水，越发沉重，回不到最初的轻盈，挤一挤就会涌出千万不甘心的话语。

他望着陈一平的背影走远，走出建筑，或许去停车场，觉得和他之间的距离也越拉越远。自己仿佛成为热闹之中，一个只有一个居民的孤岛。既孤独，又有种奇异的心酸的浪漫。交替的满足和伤感好像一群庞大的鲸鱼在围绕他喷水唱歌。

    不是人越大越不单纯，而是人越大所面对的世界越不简单。他有太多规则要遵守。在家中，他是米雪的兄长，陈一平还记得米雪眼红红又倔强地说她就是想喜欢他。在社会里，他的身份是北美主流大学之一的讲师。道德准则禁止他与他直接授课的学生发生感情纠葛，那种感情纠葛叫丑闻。

    时光带来的变迁再多，他们最了解的，恰好是最初也被藏得最深的特质。即使隔着时间和空间，注视镜头另一端的人，这些年蒙上的烟尘都在彼此的目光和笑容里洗净了。
    他们相信在最好的年纪，第一次倾心去爱上的那个人值得当时那份义无反顾的爱意。虽然最后发现不合适，没能在一起，可这段感情里绝没有谁拖欠谁。他们一直希望对方能够在别处得到幸福。

    他觉得自己没用之极，不会表达感情，不会和人接近，像是一个被扔到地球上的外星人。又像一只被扔进海里的猫。做什么都是狼狈的垂死挣扎，却溅不起半点水花。
    邓特风的心情混乱成一团乱麻，可能低血糖影响了他的神经递质，可能陈一平这个人，他的出现足以影响自己的神经递质，通过操纵脑内分泌物的浓度左右他的情绪。他的情绪像是有颜色的，各种颜料在他的血管里交汇，在画板一样的心脏上传导出图案，压得他说不出话。他听见陈一平叫：“靓仔。”抬起头来，陈一平姿势和态度都很放松，说：“请你吃糖。”

    日落卷里有蟹肉，牛油果，薄片的烟熏野生三文鱼，顶部却是切得纸片厚的两片草莓。红白纹路清爽甜美。他们坐在寿司台边，邓特风不发一言地看着陈一平在他右边夹起一个日落卷，心中说：他是真的喜欢草莓。
    迟了一会儿，又想：我是真的喜欢他。
    邓特风反而什么话都不敢说，怕一出口就是表白，吓坏他。感情就像洪 ch_ao 一样，来都来了，淹就淹吧，备受折磨也好，万一它突如其来退却，留下一片泥泞断壁残垣才令人沉重失望。邓特风很怕陈一平从他生命中退却，覆水收回似地收得涓滴不剩。

    果汁店的故事是个未完结的故事。柠檬和樱桃说了分手，仍每天去买一杯草莓西米冰沙。要说未来，他对前路全无概念。每天能见到草莓，他已足够高兴和酸涩。又很怕草莓知晓，其实他心里酸到牙痛。
    陈一平心里好像被扔进一颗泡腾片，冒着柠檬味咕噜咕噜的气泡，将 x_io_ng 口塞满，顶撞肺腑，却又让人紧闭口鼻，不愿将这膨胀逼迫内脏的气发 xi-e 出来。

    邓特风坐在靠窗边位子上，吃一份陈一平上次点过的日落卷。这场景很微妙，不想让某个人知道在想他，藉一些共同经历的事物怀念那个不愿他知道的人，一回头撞见对方也在做相同的事，窃喜之前，会先尴尬。

    静静过了十分钟，等到陈一平夹起最后一个卷，邓特风仍然没转头看他，就维持眼睛盯着别处，不由自己地轻声说：“我中意你。”
    真是奇怪，邓特风之前拼命警告自己不能脱口而出，陈一平以为他若真说出口会给自己降下一道天大的难题，可事情真发生到这一步，却双方都觉心安。阁楼上每夜会传来两声靴子落地声，他们都听到了第一道，提着一颗心等到第二声才敢安寝。现在那第二只靴子总算落地，他们可以闭上双眼了，闭眼去爱也好，去做梦也罢，无论什么结果，终于有一个结果。
    陈一平原想埋单，这时也停下动作，向后靠，双肩放松。寿司店灯光下，头发的 yi-n 影后落，邓特风很想很想捉住他的发尾。

    可他只是眼睁睁看着陈一平出门。神智和头脑都飞去另一个世界飘荡。一个人悬浮在五光十色霓虹灯的大都会夜晚里，每一步都被灯光迫近，每一步都遭遇行色匆匆陌生人，直至遇到那个，心像两块磁铁发散吸引力，日益贴近，再拉开距离会如同切肤之痛的人。偏是与那个人， yi-n 差阳错，行差踏错，衍生出一连串缠人的苦厄。
    他刚学会爱，他只会爱，他以为只要爱就够了。别人的心情，他没试过用力去理解，更谈不上天生会体谅。

    这漫长的飞行与干冷空气把他逼到一种莫名的绝望边缘。他猛然发现自己没有任何掌控力，一个人从他生命中远走是像流星划过天空一样迅捷的事。他尚在梦中，而这件事已发生。他们间没有牢固的纽带。陈一平可以随时到人海茫茫地球的另一边，从此他望着东京香港或是上海首尔新加坡熙熙攘攘、高楼林立的街景，脚下的步伐再也不知可以迈向哪里。这个世界上人真是太多了，可以随时淹没你。我在画布上给你做了不同于地球六十亿其他人的标记，可他们，那些人群，在你身上覆盖无数色块涂层。站在街头，擦着我的肩膀，撞着我的背的人全长着陌生面孔，我好不容易遇见你，我怕，我再也找不到你。

    四面佛所在十字路口前高塔一般的酒店窗边，受邀尝试泰式午茶，陈一平频频走神，向烟雾缭绕的露天佛坛望了一眼。没缘由的，他想到温哥华的那靓仔。隔着时差，他在大洋彼岸做什么？想完却好笑，在温书吧，期中考试还不够他焦头烂额？
    这一瞥，他看见四面佛，看见马路，看见绿树，看见斜角的伊势丹百货，晚了一步，没看见邓特风刚刚推门走入百货大楼的身影。

    天桥下人来人往，车灯铺呈一条金光般的长河。大小车辆俱都沐浴在这光河中，光融汇了白日各种颜色，只可见车壳和车轮黑色的剪影。
    曼谷之夜光怪陆离，好像把五彩缤纷的宝石装进玻璃黑箱里。天桥下是光河，天桥上是人河。东南亚高而茂盛的绿树枝叶婆娑，川流不息的人河里，邓特风是一块阻碍水流的河石，异国不同肤色人种的人们步伐迅速在他两侧绕开，似乎都有明确方向。

   地平线蔓延到遥远处，这里不再有高楼，至多两层粗陋的建筑。少了遮盖头顶的摩天大厦做比例尺，地平线能延伸多远，天就能有多高。在这样广阔的土地与高远的蓝天之间，半道彩虹像紫红橘黄绿的发光扶梯从地面连接到云层中去。

    这一餐泰元素终于多了，前菜是炸得偏硬的猪肉，一条条如薯条，配着橘红的稀薄酱汁，和白紫萝卜丝与洋葱生菜的沙拉。另一道直译过来，是鱼的梳乎厘。真像香橙梳乎厘一般轻盈蓬松细腻，同是橘黄色，被碧绿箬叶蛋糕纸似包成方块，并不是甜的。尝不到鱼肉，却弥漫着鱼汁与柠檬草、香茅的鲜香。

探照灯里，丝丝缕缕的喷泉交织成水晶花篮，又弥漫起水景的湿气。
    邓特风从木道另一端，前台处走来。神思混乱地肩膀碰到了蕉叶，视线短暂停留在转角处，夜色里更显洁白的一盆白色蝴蝶兰上。他向前向上看，陈一平早已望见他，他们终于，在这谁也没想到的时间和地点看见对方。在池塘边露台上，草木萋萋的微风夜晚，在原地一时大脑空白，好像患了失语症，整个世界都在这一刻停摆。
    他们大概不会知道这一次遇见经历了几次错过，不会交流几日几时几分几秒你在哪里。宇宙是一间机械精密的陈列室，地球被夜幕掩盖，在一个玻璃罩子里。每个人都有既定的轨道，有些人一世都不会交汇。而此时，他们像两尊凝固的相望的雕像，周围静静地响起蝉鸣，喷泉还在挥洒水声。在最不可想象的地方见到最不可想象的人，就好像精疲力竭得到一粒糖果。邓特风忽然不知该如何应对，尽管他白.皙的脸上并没有表情，他怕他稍微有些表情，就会像铜像那样不明所以眼里有一串水流出，面孔却完全不见悲伤。

可他那时竟不懂，他中意他，那感情是一百分一千分的喜欢。
    邓特风的感情就像红宝石，颜色光彩都有种决绝灿烂意味。陈一平将手放在他掌心，触碰那条手链，错觉被红宝的锐利切割划伤。他捡起手链，抓在手中，就硌进掌心。

他们已走到这条路南面，编织花环的小摊贩渐多。陈一平买下一串茉莉缀红玫瑰的花环，茉莉花苞像编珠一样攒成极粗的一串雪白花序，抓过他的手套上。那些花朵系在腕间既脆弱娇嫩又沉甸甸地下坠，陈一平的神情动作，都与之前要他试红宝石手链时出奇一样。..
    他们逛到凌晨三点，一径走一径走，不提这条街这家店我们已转过三次，那个人已三次看向我们。好像在一个不愿它停下的游乐场骑旋转木马。

    外面的天色已经和咖啡一样，他浮在半空中的心思也与咖啡弥漫整店的复杂苦香合拍。再晚一个多小时，才接到邓特风电话，急切地问你是不是等我很久，我即刻过来。

他双手撑着桌面，说：“一个理论，‘如果一件事能够出错，它一定会出错’。你想一件坏事来得晚，它一定会比你想到来得早。”
    邓特风这才抬头，问：“你在安 we_i 我？”
    “没有。”邓特风只是看他一眼，居然就陷在他带笑的眼里。在这时，满怀的痛楚里，怦然心动。陈一平说：“只是讲给你知道，至多不过我换份工作。”他对邓特风举咖啡杯，向上望房顶放光的灯，说：“我小时候的职业理想，是救生员。”

    她比他更知道她大哥是怎样的人，绝不会做出与她争抢的事。也许一时无法接受，反应激烈，事后也偷偷请求江绍去看他。陈一平问：“那你？”
    “我怕跟他一起你好似带小孩会累死！”江绍毫不掩饰他对邓特风的不满。旁人只挂心这故事美不美，江绍却在忧心这段感情中他可会累？最后自暴自弃说：“丢，随便了！反正我不可能支持。你爱女人爱男人，人妖都好。不搞我就好啦！你知道，我受不了男人中意我的！”

只用水冲脸擦干，只用漱口水漱口，换件恤衫出门。依旧唇红齿白，好看到连冷淡疏离都是理所当然。

    邓特风没说话，阿祖又忍不住脑海里悄悄回放，那个女孩子举高肖像过头顶仰视，得意又羞赧，脸红红的样子。小声说：“讲真的，谈恋爱无心伤到别人也是伤到了。我觉得，你欠她一个道歉。”
    自己居然会说这种话，阿祖大口喝了一口饮料压下莫名的不适应。

    他将邓特风拉下车，拉着他转身跑进建筑。已淋到一身发 ch_ao ，带邓特风避雨时还用手为他遮挡雨滴。邓特风手掌与他湿漉漉相贴，被他带下地下停车场，刷卡开一片黑暗的储物间，长长的漆黑隧道里，一步步跟随他，没有说话，只有呼吸声，和同样紧贴的手腕传递一下下彼此脉搏拍子。可心情忽然而然异常平静。
    好似我有一颗心，此刻被人所珍藏。他愿将我的心放入他 x_io_ng 膛。这一秒心情难摹难画，邓特风眼睁睁望着他背影，想，我宁愿死，宁愿在我二十岁上这一刻死去。宁以这种激烈方式保存这一刻心情不朽，从此再不必去经历遗憾。

    yi-n 影像 ch_ao 水一样裹挟他们的车，邓特风几度看着陈一平，他稳定的手和流畅的动作，想他像一座休眠火山。自己坐在一座火山旁，等着他下一次可能到来的喷发，竟觉得宁静。

    邓特风被这氛围打得措手不及，第一个念头即是：我喜欢这里。又因这样突如其来的喜爱自我谴责。他不希望这强烈喜爱是情热中的爱屋及乌，这样的感情相当于一种谄媚。他固执地希望找到缘由说明自己为何喜欢这里，因他将陈一平看得太重，爱一个人，就会时常担忧我的感情是否够郑重，怎样尊重他都不够。

可即使与邓特风的感情会下场惨烈，他不惧怕后果，因为每时每刻尽情相处都已留下记忆供他回味。
    陈一平像海上的云，该降暴雨便降下暴雨，该散开便转身被风推走。

    可那决定后才一阵阵后怕。他能接受分开后陈一平爱上别人，却无法忍受自己爱上别人。他怕多少年后初春、盛夏，下雨、下雪或是日光里长街相遇，他抱着自己的儿女，陈一平仍单身一人，无话只擦肩过。双方皆忘记“我曾与这人一起”，双唇相贴，双手相牵的熟悉也像旧恤衫有一日要被洗衣机绞坏。他以前懵懵懂懂，真的不知道上天不准人容易做到一生只爱一个人。一旦想到“未来的我或许就不再爱他了”，都能让此时的邓特风痛彻心扉。

陈一平大概在二十七、八岁才骤然醒悟，原来“爱”不是因你完美我便全心爱你；也不仅是因为我爱你，所以我能接受你不完美；更多的是，因为我爱你，我愿学习接受面对自己的所有的缺陷旧患。

    爱情多辛苦，可它毕竟值得。若世上无爱情，什么能把我带来你身边？

    不确信床上的角色代表着什么，但是他想，床上的角色至少是具备一些意义的。能和陈一平在一起，怎样都好，但是第一次，第一次绝不一样。他想以自己最想要的方式得到最重要的人，天真地想要告诉他：我会成长，我想为你遮蔽风雨；一直被你照顾很好，但你偶尔，某些时刻，可否也学着依靠我。

陈一平想笑，邓特风先堵住他的话语，只是唇在唇上碰一下，贴在他颈边说：“我不想做。”他知道自己反复无常，不知是不是代自己辩解，说：“可不可以，给我少一点，但是久一点。”

    明明没有来历，明明没有理由。邓特风不知道为什么自己会在机上茫然落泪。陈一平明明没有放开他的手，美国与加国，纽约与温哥华又能有多少距离？于是他搜寻遍脑海，寻不到一个此时哭泣的理由。他毕竟不曾爱过，不能理解爱情突如其来的无理和情深处自然而然的悲哀。他毕竟太年轻。

    早晚都帮他带狗狗散步，自然要每天住在一起才可以。陈一平的关注点在宠物带来的责任上，并未看穿米雪和邓特风达成同一阵线的小心思。他只觉得荒唐：“你们这么合得来，不如你们在一起啊，好不好。”
    曾经使心内如沸进退两难的问题，到如今亦能作笑谈。米雪毫不回避，当即小声念：“又不是没试过，没感觉嘛。”

    卡通里樱桃用樱桃耳夹表示，柠檬的单肩包上有柠檬，草莓是衬衣一粒纽扣是草莓形状。唯独江绍，真正头顶香蕉。最后一页，邓特风甚至画了江绍两幅设计图，一幅头顶香蕉皮，一幅头顶香蕉再插一把水果刀。他解释说原本想画成这样但是因为江绍是陈一平朋友不能太不尊重他，所以头顶香蕉已经权衡之后是手下留情的后果。多画这样一页，那意思分明是“你应该为我的善解人意夸奖我”。

    他想与陈一平过这样的日子，终于可以感受与陈一平过这样的日子。
    每次假期回到温哥华与陈一平共度，他作息混乱，也是因为夜晚不敢入眠，害怕醒来发现一切只是一场大梦：他仍只二十岁，孤身一个人。与他这样相配，会这样深爱他的恋人纯属梦中大脑虚构。——不是有这个人他不曾遇见，而是这爱人根本不存在于世上，今生今世都无从遇见更不可寻得。邓特风居然被这种猜想折磨。

    邓特风张开嘴，米雪与阿祖二人的发展相当突兀。可是他看见米雪静静的笑脸，蓦然察觉一切早有伏笔。
    他画的米雪肖像到阿祖手上，从阿祖手上被米雪见到。阿祖那句“你欠她一句对不起”，是邓特风要他代替自己送上那封道歉信。

涨 ch_ao 的水拍着小艇，随他们醒来划船，一片聚光灯下油彩一般的暮色波光中，海鸥扑剌剌从他们触手可及的身边惊飞。他猛然想，像不像一幅画，在光源前导致一切都要用 yi-n 影表示，像莫奈用红黄紫黑表现日落时所有色彩的画。海波荡着长木桥就到了晚上，而桥上的人看他们，那模糊渺小的船只和身影，或者也像一幅风景画。
    我愿与你在画里，在他人的作品里。用画笔颜料数码像素或是字符保存，在画板上文档里网络中某处，在二十年后会积满尘埃无人造访的某个角落。只要你我依然存在，纵使人类会抛弃互联网，网路节点成为一个个掩埋地下无人考古的废墟，我拥有你。

   炙寿司里有蓝旗金枪鱼腩，鹅肝，鲽鱼，和牛，龙虾，黑鳕鱼，太平洋鲱鱼腩，以及黑睦鱼。每种两件。做成手握寿司后，用火喷枪在表面炙烤，再加以调味，火候掌握全看主厨，口感比全生手握寿司更有层次，也更好接受。
    这一餐微微炙烤过的鱼腩好像要融化却又将融未融，鹅肝肥美到如同一口酥而焦香的油脂。鲽鱼边缘层层卷起，包在寿司上，烤过后带着一股鱼类的香味。黑睦鱼肉色雪白，比鱼腩更肥美，但是清爽不觉腻。

    邓特风眨眼，没想到会得到这样答案。他们的关系在发生微妙改变，陈一平愿意在他面前坦承怯懦。邓特风说：“我没有，我没有想逼你和我结婚。我只想弄清这一点。这样很好，我可以和你谈一辈子恋爱。”

    他无法让时间凝固，无法拒绝老去。陈一平当然会，根据自然规律有很大可能，比他早离世。早三年也好，五年也好。他将被留下，独身一个人。但孤独不意味着爱情的终结。我们将相爱一生，你若先离去，不会把我的爱情带走。他会像以往一样生活，代陈一平去看所有留在世上，他关心的人。或许是朋友，或许是亲人，或许是朋友亲人的子女。他期待自己大限到来的那一天，他生命自然终止时那个势必到来的团聚。然后骄傲地告诉他，我代替你看护了那些被留下的人。将分别日子里一件件，一桩桩琐事讲清。仿佛对方没有在自己最后的岁月里缺席。
    他不愿悲观，用一天想过很多人生欢乐事。末尾发现，人生最大欢乐事，就是我和你。
    这多么幼稚，又多么诚恳。可能是在一个人二十岁时能想到的最深沉的情话，最郑重的告白。

Robert Jackson Bennett's second installment in the Ana and Din series puts a kingdom next to the empire and reminds us why things can always be worse. Din's relationship with Captain Strovi was so healthy and sweet that it's almost cruel for the author to keep them apart like this.

• “Well, we don’t get any Legionnaires for protection out here. We are far from the Empire proper, and there are no leviathans this far north. Yet it makes a crude sense, does it not? For what are human beings, if not walking bags of valuable reagents and compounds?”
• “It has always been called ossuary moss—though it is not truly a moss but a predatory fungus. It lives in hollows in the earth, lining the chambers there, waiting for creatures to fall in. When they do, the moss stings them, paralyzing them, and slowly grows to swallow them, like a cocoon. That’s when the truly fun stuff happens.” She grunted as she shifted the brick. “It secretes a fluid, cleaning the organism of the many pestilences that cause rot. Almost like curing it, really, so it can then consume all the tissues, with no waste.
• She did so, gingerly turning the jawbone and the fragment of torso like they were fine crockery I had a mind to purchase.
• “That is one term for it,” she conceded. “The craftsmen of the old courts grew these towers from a type of sand, full of tiny bugs. You could add things to the sand, put it in a mold, and the bugs within would make it harden into that shape. But the stone did not age well. Didn’t settle right. And many things leaned.”
• Now—step fast. We are in a dangerous area. I don’t want anyone seeing your very pretty face, assuming you’re a rich man who paid for the shaping of it, and knifing you for your talints.”
• * “The Usini Lending Group manages much credit within the Iyalets,” Poskit said, still in that saccharine tone. “It is our prerogative to maintain awareness of where our clients are stationed at any given moment.” <> Of course, I thought. The one institution that was more capable than the Iyalets themselves, naturally, were the Empire’s moneylenders.
• As I trudged through the streets of Yarrowdale, my heart felt shadowed. If my father’s new debts were to follow me about the Empire like a ghostly lamia from the children’s tales, then my dream of a new service would remain just that: a dream, and nothing more.
• * “Are they not your lands, too?” <> A trim smile. “Spoken like one who has never known a king.”
• In an instant, she shed her air of dreamy reflection, and her face twisted into an expression of poisonous condescension. “Business!” she scoffed, and ripped the blindfold from her head. “Business, yes! But business long done! That pot of shit soup has been bubbling for years now…
• “And…that puts us in a spot, for it produces the most valuable reagents in all the Empire.” <> “Quite correct! Squeezed from dead leviathans out in the bay like juice from an aplilot, then rendered in countless Apoth facilities on the shores.
• * “Exactly. Now the value of the city is astronomical. And in less than a decade it shall all be transferred over to the Empire itself! And the king, well…he would very much like to back out of the deal his great-great-grandfather made. He wishes to extort more money, more resources, more agreements from the Empire. Which means every day is a fucking temper tantrum with him! Goddamn autocrats. They really are hardly better than shit-stained children.”
• * I thought of my brief service in Talagray, and the Legionnaires I had known there. One soldier burned bright in my mind: Captain Kepheus Strovi, with whom I’d spent only a handful of days, yet in my augmented mind it felt akin to a lifetime. <> I placed my hand on my mossbed and let my eyes flutter in my skull. My thoughts sang with the touch of him, the smell of him.
• To others, the dance might have seemed artful, yet to me, it was routine. I had memorized this method over the past year as I’d moved from place to place: much like picking a lock, some combination of these gestures and exchanges worked to win the right attentions. Or perhaps that was not quite it: perhaps I was more like a man dabbing bloods and scents upon his flesh as he stood before a darkened wood, waiting for some predator within to pounce on him and spirit him away.
• Afterward: when all was spent, and the shuddering grew still, and the sweaty limbs atop my own grew cool. Only then I could hold them and make the world small for me. <> No more debts or moneylenders. No more bodies and blood. No more trivial little people burdened with hearts both vicious and dull. Only then, perhaps, the absence of Kepheus would burn a little less bright, and all would be small and controllable.
• “None of the rest of my delegation fell ill. But Sujedo was, ah…a very inner ring sort of person. “Meaning…” “Meaning,” drawled Malo, “the fellow was softer than a jellied egg.”
• But just in case you’ve got someone else’s spit in your mouth, we also ask for piss. Less likely to have someone else’s piss in their belly. Then we apply reagents to the samples, swab it on the balmleaf substrate for the safe, and it’s done. All this means that box should have been one of the most secured things in all of Yarrow.”
• A banded tooth was a false molar that had been grown in a reagents tank with a unique striping pattern running across the enamel. When an officer received such a tooth, the pattern was assigned to their name, so if their corpse was ever discovered in the future, it could be speedily identified.
• * And now—this! A fucking note! I feel we needn’t bother looking at faces to find this man, Din! Just keep an eye out for the fellow with testicles large enough to cause back deformities, and we shall have our culprit!”
• “I disdain it. I disdain it so, all this fucking spectacle! Nothing irks me more than a showy murderer, as if their wretched deeds were some mystical marvel!”
• “Perhaps. For in a way, do we not all sip from the titan’s marrow, in one fashion or another?”
• * A nervous smile from Ghrelin, yet he shot a searching glance at Thelenai, as if to confirm that his smile did not bring reproach. It was in this small gesture that I suddenly felt I had the feel of them: Thelenai was the grand and steely queen of this realm, and he was her scurrying counselor, rushing to invent laws to match her will.
• I hope I was not untoward in assuming you might want this.”
  The commander brought the parchments before Ana, bowed, and returned to his seat. Ana sat for a moment, nonplussed to have one of her requests for information not only exactly predicted, but quickly met.
  “Oh,” she muttered. She plucked at the parchments like they were a dish she had not ordered.
• “I have witnessed folk altered in such a fashion. Merely nearing the unmentionable subject causes them significant pain. I did not note such pain in Ghrelin.” She flicked a hand, dismissing the subject. “It was a random aside. Ignore it for now—but do remember it, Din.”
• She shut the book with a snap. “Ah. I will go ahead and assume, then, that you are not familiar with the Adherents of the Sallow Fields?” <> I waved wearily. “Assume away.”
• Instead, they tap—rapping three fingers in a rhythmic, mathematical alphabet, upon boards they hang about their necks. It’s a tricky way to talk—they have to wait one at a time to tap out their messages, otherwise it gets very hard to hear.
• “Yes. Unconsciously, perhaps, like he was trained to let every thought in his brain spill down his arm to his fingers to be tapped out. How deliciously ridiculous, yes?” <> “I find all these mentions of doom somewhat less than delightful, ma’am,” I said weakly.
• “Two Apoths, both of them tapping. And both of them, apparently, are geniuses, of a sort…for one served on the Shroud itself, and indeed built the veil that surrounds it, while the other pulled off a theft of frankly absurd complexity. Then there is the mention of marrow, and their reaction to it. And we know the impostor did not steal healing grafts…So, what if what was in that box had something to do with the Shroud, or this marrow?”
• “It is for me,” she said. She shot me a sharp look. “But I wonder if it’s enough for you. Mostly because your current method of emotional management is obviously not working!”... And while I do not know where your spiritual serenity lies, I am pretty sure it isn’t in another person’s bed, or ass, or whatever the hell it is you keep getting up to in the evenings!”
• “Oh, don’t bother with discretion now!” she said. “You’ve all the prudence of an inebriated cow! I’m half surprised people don’t gossip that you are a whore for hire, and I your pimp! It’d all be very amusing, if the reason for your consternation weren’t so obvious!”
  “And what reason do you think that is, ma’am?” I demanded, flustered.
  “It is that you believe we do little significant in our work!” Ana thundered. “And thus, you dream of transferring to the Legion!”
• I suspect you shall come to realize what many Iudexii eventually learn—that though the Legion defends our Empire, it falls to us to keep an Empire worth defending.”
• “How excellent. Did you know that the lyre duet is one of the ancient arts of Yarrow, Din?”... “Yes. Some say it reflects the dominance of twins and triplets in the royal lineage here—a rather fascinating biological quirk. Led to some very interesting issues with inheritance,
• The Yarrow of old still thrives in the west of here, living under the rule of the king. There the nobles and chief men have inherited many elder things. They have inherited lands from their fathers, and the oaths of loyalty that their fathers made to the king…and they have inherited people. Naukari. The ones bound to serve.”
• “Then you may go. Have the Apoth quartermaster send me food, three chamber pots, and enough quiridine pellets to soak up the stench.” Another melancholic chord. “I’ll let you empty them when you return.
• These are wardens. These are people who spend days in the swamp waiting to shoot smugglers with many arrows. I would no more assume they are an example of Yarrow folk than I would assume a rabid dog is a common pet.”
• Malo stared. “You…you did not even get that, Kol? By the titan’s taint, what kind of man are you? Some kind of fricatrat, making your rounds?”
• Malo was so amused by this that she translated it for her fellow wardens, who whooped and chuckled huskily. It made for a strange sound: they had trained so strenuously as hunters, apparently, that they even knew how to avoid laughing aloud.
• From the chest to the hip bone, the bare torso appeared to bloom into a tangle of silvery, slender skeletons, like the bones of many fish, yet it was difficult to tell where the man’s body ended and this twisted storm of glistening fishbones began. It was as if they sprouted from his flesh, or from his pelvis and rib cage, like a school of minnows leaping from his abdomen, and some of the skeletons had eyes that were small, malformed, and peeping.
• yet the bodies had somehow unraveled, turning into wild storms of fishbones, or bundles of warped leathers, or boiling, spidery clouds of gossamer threads, with clutches of teeth suspended in their glistening heads. <> I stared about in horror. It was dark within the dome of growth, yet shafts of hazy, amber sunlight came stabbing through in places, shivering with the wind and sometimes illuminating some new horror at the edges of the shadow, or giving those close to me the illusion of movement. It was as if this little leafbound bubble of the world had gone utterly insane.
• “A blotley larva,” he said. “Type of highly altered, parasitic fly. Sucks your blood, yes—but they’re very sensitive. Even the slightest trace of contagion within you will kill them.”... “It won’t,” said Tangis. “This is an altered, unnatural creature, created for this one purpose. It can’t survive in the wild anymore. It can’t even eat properly. If I let it go long enough, it’ll actually start leaking your own blood back into you.”
• “Algaeoil,” I said. “Saliva. Mucus. And…sweat?” <> “And also the aroma of the little glue they use for the helms’ eyepieces,” Ana said, pleased. “Figured you were sniffing that throughout your ordeal. Now you’ve a scent. So, talk, child! Talk, and talk quick!”
• * “We fear the elements, and plague, and the wrath of the leviathans. Yet if we are to see clear-eyed, we would admit that the will of men is as unforgiving as these. How many chieftains and champions have wrought just as much sorrow as the wet seasons? We must govern thoughtfully, then, and manage such passions wisely—for if these folk have their way, we shall return to nature primordial, and be as beasts, and all the world a savage garden, mindless and raging.”
• “The first quote we found included an inversion of the imperial creed—I am the Empire—taken from a quote where the emperor worried his realm would grow selfish and unjust, and fall. And this one is an inversion of the emperor’s vision—for Daavir feared the will of cruel men making all the world a savage garden... “Exactly,” Ana said. “My feeling is that this man suggests he has rather unpleasant feelings about the Empire’s presence here!
• “The Senate of the Sanctum authorized a research project here in Yarrowdale just over a decade ago,” said Ghrelin, his voice growing fragile, “to answer one question—what if we could extract not only the blood but the marrow itself? What if we could bathe it in nutrients and maintain it so it kept producing the blood well after the titan has died?”...  “but apt. We have kept our labors secret, for obvious reasons—if the king of Yarrow were to find out we were laboring in his backyard to render his entire kingdom irrelevant to the Empire, it would be politically destabilizing. But…if we achieved this feat, the effects would go well beyond ridding us of the king.”
• “Healing grafts and suffusions you can scarcely imagine,” said Thelenai. “We could end the plague of sterility that comes with so many alterations. Bring about an age of abundance like when the first Khanum emerged from the valley in the ancient days and changed all the world before them.” <> “We could even heal our Sublimes,” said Ghrelin. “Many of us are plagued by mental afflictions as we grow old and lead short lives. With an abundance of kani, we could change even that.”
• By carefully injecting the organ with an advanced strain of oli muk—or ossuary moss, as you refer to it—we could wrap up the marrow like a fly in a spider’s web and keep it preserved indefinitely. We had to do it in the right sequence
• “But this means the marrow, too, is always different,” said Thelenai. “Biologically different in shape, density, nature…so each extraction had to be different. We needed a way of reading the randomness. Only then could we succeed.”... “What we needed,” she said finally, “was a different way of looking at it. A different type of mind. That is why we produced augury. And that changed everything.”... “They were instrumental in our progress,” said Thelenai. “The physiology of the leviathans is so unpredictable, so dangerous, and so random—only the augurs could make sense of it.”
• The augurs read things into the slightest inflection, or word choice, or hesitation. So, on the Shroud…they do not speak aloud, but rather tap to communicate, in a very old code. This method is much less affected by nuance.”
• * Ana impatiently flapped a hand. “And if the marrow was successfully attacked? If, say, Pyktis again used his titan’s blood weapon and managed to penetrate all your defenses about the marrow, there upon the Shroud?”
  A taut silence.
  “Then…then the marrow would act like…a fissure in the earth dripping lava, layer upon layer,” whispered Thelenai. “Releasing more blood, and more alterations.”
• “And…these colleagues are also augurs,” said Ana, “which means they, too, possess hypersensitive abilities of prediction and analysis?”... “Ones that would be enormously useful if they were put to the task of analyzing Pyktis?”
• “Thelenai I shall have to handle in good time,” said Ana grudgingly. “I am sure she thinks she did the right thing—that healing so many in the future was worth inflicting pain on a few in the present—but secretly, she did it for the same reason so many regents crumble.”... “Pride,” answered Ana. “She wrote a story in her mind, with herself as hero, clad in the trappings of triumph. It’s possible the greatness she has accomplished here could have been done with no deception, and thus less disaster. But a prideful creature can talk themself into believing that every deed they do is legitimate. Thus, they both giddily and greedily spin their own doom.”
• “You…you asked us to prepare our uniforms,” I said, “because you had already anticipated the next murder.” <> “I would have thought that fucking obvious!” thundered Ana. “We knew Pyktis had produced poison, there in his den! We knew he had an oathcoin, suggesting he’d been to the High City before! And we knew he’d likely seen the smokes in the jungle and would know that we’d found his macabre little display! Thus, he has begun the next bit of his game!
• To begin with, the bells did not stop tolling for over three hours, which meant all discussions in Yarrowdale had to be bellowed at close distance in order to be heard.
• “It seems we are now in the business of court intrigue!” said Ana. She wrinkled her nose. “How trite.”
• While this made housing and construction easy enough, it also meant that the art of stonework quickly became the domain of the wealthy and the powerful; for while resources were plentiful in the Empire, labor was eternally expensive.
• Perhaps that was what drove my astonishment: the sheer sense of age of this place. All the towers felt like they’d been here for centuries, and all the soldiers looked like warriors from some archaic saga. Though much of the Empire was indeed old, few of its structures were, for buildings were constantly being cut down and regrown whenever needed. And if a structure was old—like the sea walls, or the ring walls—then it was often an unsightly, forbidding spectacle. <> This place, however, felt beautiful and eternal. A stunning sight to a person like me, from an improvised Empire that often felt so blandly bureaucratic.
• “And if his guilt is proven,” said Pavitar to Ana indignantly, “will you fight our application of justice? Shall you try and steal him away, though he killed our king?” <> Ana shrugged. “If I deem he truly is the murderer of your king, then I see no reason why he cannot be killed here! A dead man cannot be greatly bothered by who owns the patch of earth he swings over—true?”
• His people were distraught, yet he did not perish. Pavitar claimed this was yet more sign of his guilt, but…even then, I felt the Empire would employ better poisoners than this.”
• some of my people haven’t ever even seen a drawn sword, do you know this? They’re axioms, number-readers! They quaked like children awoken by an owl!”
• “Exactly,” said Ana. “The killer had a personal connection to that one, so he felt compelled to hide him deeper. Once we knew this, we found the killer quickly—the dead child’s uncle,
• With the marrow secured, we could develop many methods of creating all the titan’s blood we need, deep in the safety of the inner rings. No more Shroud, no more canals, no more barges.” She scratched her chin. “So…you weren’t negotiating the final imperial adoption of the realm of Yarrow, were you? You were secretly negotiating our withdrawal from this place.”
• * The prificto shifted uncomfortably. “If I could banish all the evils of the world, child, know I would do it. But it is not our purpose to wade into the affairs of other cultures and scold them into decency.”
• * “But there is a silent agreement of how oathcoins work. You return it to the man who gave it to you for a favor. You could go above him, to a higher lord or even the king—but only if the need is great, and the favor does not bring insult. Otherwise, you would be in tremendous peril. But Dokha…he was a very good boy. Very selfless, you see.”
  “He asked for your freedom?” I guessed.
  “He did,” said Malo. “The freedom of all the naukari who were below the age of ten. And they made us watch as they killed him for it. Struck his head from his shoulders as if it were a piece of clay, then sank his corpse to the bottom of one of our holy lakes.”... It is how my folk so eagerly cling to the poisoned relics of throne and chain.
• But to me, your plans taste like the fantasies of a young man, attempting to invent a way out. We are small things, Kol. We are given no charity in this world.”
• Ana arched her eyebrows at that. “Ohh? Am I to believe, Din, that you now compare your own struggles with those wardens and naukari of Yarrow? That your own stymied hopes of transferring to the Legion make you akin to abandoned warriors and entrapped slaves?
• * “This work can never satisfy, Din, for it can never finish. The dead cannot be restored. Vice and bribery will never be totally banished from the cantons. And the drop of corruption that lies within every society shall always persist. The duty of the Iudex is not to boldly vanquish it but to manage it.
• I was at the shore. The sky was slate-gray and mutinous, the dawning sun a narrow blade of riotous red in the east. I clambered out of the carriage and stumbled along the jetty to the waiting cargo ship, trying to coordinate my arms and legs to move aright. I was lost inside my body, which was lost inside the suit, and the whole of me was lost on this wandering stripe of rocky coast.
• The Shroud was not a tent, I realized, nor a structure of gauze or moss, as I’d previously imagined; rather, it was thicker, fleshier, more gelatinous, less akin to fabric or vines and more like some colossal growth of seaweed rising from the waters. Nor was it all one piece, but layered like a flower’s petals, each roll of its husk coiled about the next, its viridine flesh shot through with veins of dark green bubbles. <> And it moved. It rippled and shifted, billowing in one long, undulating flex from end to end, over and over. It was so strange, and beautiful, and artful; yet there was a subtle terror to it, and to look upon it set something crawling behind my eyes.
• “People worshipped them as gods once,” said Ghrelin quietly. “I think of that whenever I make this voyage.”... “And I cannot blame them,” Ghrelin continued. “These giant, inexplicable things, thundering ashore, bringing so much death and strangeness with them. That’s what faith and the divine is, isn’t it? A line stretching from little beings like us, to the ineffable, the incomprehensible.”
• A bright, tremulous wall of pale flesh would subside into a wall of dull, brown brick, only to then be followed by a hull of plated steel, with tiny, glassy windows stubbling its surface; and all about it were looping pipes and vessels, some wrought of bronze, others of flesh, like tracts of ropy intestine, carrying fluids up and down the hide of the tremendous thing.
• * “What does it mean,” he said, “when the line that once connected us to the inscrutable and ineffable instead coils about, forms a great loop—and then comes back to us?”
• my suit now so hot it felt like I was being braised within a bladder.
• I wondered what to do. Then I realized: all this felt rather familiar, didn’t it? Didn’t I know very well how to deal with a person so ravenous for information? <> I said, “Aren’t you wise enough to determine the answers by what I cannot say, as opposed to what I can?”
• The man, wistfully, dreamily: “To serve with him was akin to loving a person made of glass. So difficult to perceive. So still, so cold, so hard to the touch.”
• And then there was the truth I’d spied in that awful place, which boiled in my mind like a hot ball of iron dropped into a cooling bucket. I had to be rid of it, for otherwise it might burn me up.
• * I believe his father the king plotted this long ago—a plot to place a Yarrow loyalist deep within the Empire’s workings here, with the eventual goal of sabotaging the Shroud itself! He would use one of his own children to stab at its heart, like marring the heartwood of a great tree. With this act, he would damage the Empire most terribly, and unravel its influence over his kingdom.” She raised her blindfolded eyes to the ceiling. “It was, I think, a suicidal mission. Pyktis himself said his father expected him to die on the Shroud, after all... “So much so that I think the king forgot he’d ever put such a secret plan in place to begin with, thirty-some years ago! Thus Sunus Pyktis washed ashore, a prince who’d not only failed in his one and only duty, but a prince completely forgotten by the realm he’d lived to serve! A rather tragic thing, is it not? He returned to his country as a man with no nation and no identity to call his own. So he invented a new one—the pale king, lord of the canals.”
• saw a way to cleverly misuse the horrid little things. He stole a crate of them from an Apoth barge, stuck countless larvae on Sujedo, let them drink their fill, then stuck them on his own body! He left them there long enough so that they leaked Sujedo’s blood into him—and that allowed him to just walk into the vault like he belonged there!”
• “Here is your path now, child. First, you pursue Darhi. Question him, for we must find either Pyktis or the stolen reagents! By achieving either, all our threats shall be ended.”
• * “Apophenia,” she said again. “The affliction of spying meaning and patterns in randomness. The augurs struggle with it, yet…I feel it is this state he aimed to induce in me. He bombards me with so much evidence and motives and mysteries that my mind cannot function! It is as if he knows my very nature.”
• Ana raised the knife; but my horror was entirely wrong, for rather than slashing at the flesh, she wedged the blade between the corpse’s teeth and wiggled it back and forth, until a tooth came free with an awful crunch. Then she dropped my knife and turned the tooth over and over in her fingers, like a witch reading her scrying stone.
• “Don’t you see?” said Ana. “The augurs of the Shroud are unusually vulnerable to music. And I just happen to have composed a percussive song that is uniquely irritating to an augur—always suggesting order yet dissolving before it coheres! A song to drive an augur mad, in other words, no matter how iron their will. And so it has.” She grinned. “For that man in that throne is not the prince. He is an augur. He is, in fact, none other than Sunus Pyktis himself!”
• “He bound the dead Prince Camak up in moss and stored his brother’s body away, waiting for the perfect time to fake his death again. For if the trick worked once, it could certainly do so a second time!
• “You fed Darhi’s greed, and his avarice,” Ana said to Pyktis. “An easy thing, for a snake like him! You even knew he’d eventually betray you. But then you arranged the trail just so. It was you who hid the oathcoin in your den, knowing that Darhi was so free with them! And you knew we’d eventually identify Gorthaus as the traitor, and she would name Darhi as the architect of all of this. Honestly, what fools we’d be if we thought it was anyone but Darhi behind it all!” She stuck a finger out at him. “But it was you, of course, and not Darhi, who killed the king.”
• “If the marrow was destroyed,” said Ana, “then you knew the Empire would have to stay in Yarrow for years longer. The Empire lacked the will to fully adopt the region—you’d already put that together ages ago—but they’d be more than happy to keep paying the court to keep things just as they were. And oh, you’d make sure the Empire would pay you a fortune.”...  “And, of course, it also explained your macabre campaign of terror—you wanted to terrify Thelenai into taking a desperate measure. All this business of heads and warped smugglers…all of it was a story you fed us, to make Thelenai panic and move the marrow by ship, far away from here.
• But even if he’d lived, the goal would have been achieved anyway—for how could we believe such a liar when he claimed he was not the killer of the body found in his litter? You’d win either way. We would think all the villains captured or killed, and all was safe—and we would relax, and relent.
• * “Kings.” Pyktis shuddered. “For so long I was told they were wondrous fathers, farsighted rulers touched by the divine. The natural rule of strength, of crown, of throne—a noble thing, unlike the Empire, so unnatural and invented. But when I looked upon my father, I saw they are just…men. Little men with muddy, ugly little minds, who fall to common corruptions just like anyone.” His face twisted. “Just like everyone in the Empire. Just like Thelenai.”... “She is just like him, do you know that?” he asked. “She made tools of us, asking us to sacrifice ourselves, to risk our lives and minds for her own little treasure. You all do. The Empire weeps so grandly, and bedecks the dead with gold and lands, but…it is still the same as my father. You call it serving. But you are slaves, and your masters shall never know any consequence.”
• * said Pyktis bitterly. “It is the same in all nations of the earth. You are either a slave or a master. I had my chance. I made my choice.” <> Ana nodded slowly, then tsked. “I see…Simple nihilism, then. How terribly unimaginative. With you being so brilliant, Pyktis, I thought your motivations might wind up being a bit more interesting!
• “Both the kings and the thieves, the angels and the utter bastards, are all inevitably quite human. Though that should not let our hand be any softer when justice is delivered!”
• but I committed great crimes in doing so. I kept the augury a secret and worked mightily to hide it from the Senate of the Sanctum. Because of this choice, dozens are dead, and the entire Empire might have unraveled. I would not wish for any other Apothetikal to follow in my steps, or grow so prideful and careless as I. And…I feel I do not deserve to see the bright future I have made.” She gazed west, toward the High City. “I, perhaps, am more like Pyktis and his father than a true imperial servant. And I should not taint the world to come with my touch.”
• * “Why, it’s the…the crushing disappointment of it all. The investigation ends. It’s all over now. No more riddles, no more need for imagination. And all was so small, at the end. It was for money, and land, and brutal, petty nihilism. Honestly, how…how tremendously disappointing.”
• “For while one common man is no equal to a Khanum, a great host of them working in agreement, and describing all they see and know, may not only match my kin, but exceed them in their deeds. Thus, with laws and strictures, and offices and election, and the changing of coin and the scribblings of many ledgers, shall a new Empire be fashioned.
• “It is good to place oneself before the vast expanse of this world,” said Ana. “The ocean cannot tell the difference between a rich man and a poor one, nor one full of happiness, or despair. To those waves, all are so terribly small.” <> “Being an imperial from the Outer Rim,” I said, “I need little help in feeling such a thing, ma’am.”
• * “Kings, of course. Perhaps we wished to make the ancient and divine mortal, to render the infinite in flesh and form. How reassuring that would be! And yet, a fool’s game, as we have so thoroughly learned here... We need no more kingly stuff than that! Not from the emperor, nor the kings of Yarrow…” She slowly turned her blindfolded face to me. “Nor anyone else.” <> I studied her and felt countless meanings hidden in these words. It was like so many great imperial things: so much was mystery, while the rest was politely unspeakable.
• I bowed my head. I felt my heart almost burst with tension from so many things going unsaid in that moment. Was she what I suspected her to be? Was she asking, however indirectly, for me to watch over her, and ensure that her own mind did not go awry, just as had happened to Pyktis? Was this the role she had planned for me all this time?

//Because all the characters in this story—like all of humanity, apparently—have a little blank spot in their heads that says, “Kings. What a good idea.” The idea is powerful, and seductive, and should not be underestimated. To be a civilization of any worth, however, means acknowledging the idea—and then condemning it as laughably, madly stupid.

John Hersey's propaganda novel has some fine crowd scenes. I wouldn't have let the three soldiers who destroyed their host's precious art collection off so easily like the good Major.

• He was a good man, though weak in certain attractive, human ways, and what he did and what he was not able to do in Adano represented in miniature what America can and cannot do in Europe. Since he happened to be a good man, his works represented the best of the possibilities.
• * That is where we are lucky. No other country has such a fund of men who speak the languages of the lands we must invade, who understand the ways and have listened to their parents sing the folk songs and have tasted the wine of the land on the palate of their memories.
• Until there is a seeming stability in Europe, our armies and our after-armies will have to stay in Europe. Each American who stays may very well be extremely dependent on a Joppolo, not only for language, but for wisdom and justice and the other things we think we have to offer Europeans.
• Next you’ll be raising monuments, Major Joppolo, first to an unknown soldier, then to yourself. I don’t trust you men who are so sentimental and have too damn much conscience.”
  “Cut the kidding,” the Major said. There was an echo in the way he said it, as if he were a boy having been called wop by others in school. In spite of the gold maple leaf of rank on the collar, there was an echo.
• “I know my business, I know what I want to do, I know what its like to be poor, Borth.”
  Borth was silent. He found the seriousness of this Major Joppolo something hard to penetrate.
• This was not one of those impermanent-looking, World’sFair-architecture Fascist headquarters which you. see in so many Italian towns, buildings so up to the moment in design that, like airplanes, they were obsolete before they were ever finished... After all the poverty which had shouted and begged in the streets, this room was stiflingly rich.
• Zito thought quickly and said: “That, Mister Major, is Columbus discovering America.” <> Zito smiled because it was a beautiful lie. Major Joppolo did not discover for three weeks that the picture was really a scene from the Sicilian Vespers, that bloody revolt which the Sicilians mounted against a previous invader.
• Notes to Joppolo from Joppolo. And he read: “Don’t make yourself cheap. Always be accessible to the public. Don’t play favorites. Speak Italian whenever possible. Don’t lose your temper. When plans fall down, improvise…”
• * Cacopardo broke into furious Italian: “Fat one, you think only of your stomach. The spirit is more important than the stomach. The bell was of our spirit. It was of our history. It was hung on the tower by Pietro of Aragona. It was designed by the sculptor Lucio de Anj of Modica.” <> Craxi said in Italian: “People who are very hungry have a ringing in their ears. They have no need of bells.” Cacopardo said: “By this bell the people were warned of the invasion of Roberto King of Naples, and he was driven back.”
• Cacopardo the historian said: “He meant no offense. It is an old custom here. Once the important people make us kiss their hands, and later when the actual kissing became too much of a bother, it became the habit merely to mention the kissing, as if it had been done.”
• Town crier: Mercurio Salvatore stood before Major Joppolo in tawdry splendor. He wore a uniform of the eighteenth century, and looked as if he had been wearing it ever since that time...  the silk had long since fallen apart, and Carmelina the wife of Fatta had replaced it with sacking from the sulphur refinery which she had dyed purple with grape juice, but the purple had washed out in the first few rains, so that now Mercurio Salvatore was a walking advertisement of Cacopardo Sulphur.
• He took a deep breath. Blood and wind rushed into his throat, and his throat roared: “Well, you laughed. But you can see that Mercurio Salvatore is still your crier. The Americans are friends of Mercurio Salvatore. The Americans wish to be your friends, too. You have been expecting the Americans for some time, but did you expect the changes which would come after the Americans?
• Zito said: “Then Adano will not want your Liberty Bell. Adano would not like to have a crack, I am sure.” Major Joppolo said: “Then that’s out.” And he thought some more.
• * Little Ludovico, not having been outside the Church at seventeen minutes past seven on a Sunday morning for most of the years he could remember, rushed out into the sunlight without thinking to ask where the American Major would be found, or, for that matter, who the American Major was, and why there was an American Major in the town
• The service in the Church of Sant’ Angelo was taking a most unusual course. Having completed the supplication, Father Pensovecchio started reciting the Litany of Saint Joseph. It was the longest litany he could think of offhand, and he repeated the words without any sense of their meaning... Suddenly Father Pensovecchio broke off. He had had an idea. He beckoned again to the senior acolyte and whispered in his ear: “Have old Guzzo ring the bell.”
• He is so busy that he had to run all the way to church, and even then was somewhat late. But we are very glad to have him here.” Father Pensovecchio spoke with feeling. “We are glad that he is one of us. Because of this man, I believe that the Americans are my friends.
• This man was called by the people The Man With Two Hands, because of his continuous and dramatic gesturing... He possessed and exercised all the essentially Italian gestures: the two forefingers laid side by side, the circle of thumb and forefinger, the hands up in stop position, the sign of the cuckold and of the genitals, the salute to the forehead with palm forward, the fingertips of the two hands placed tip to tip, the fingers linked, the hands flat and downward as if patting sand, the hands up heel to heel and pulled toward the chest, the attitude of prayer, the pointing forefinger of accusation, the V as if for victory or smoking cigarettes, the forefinger on the chin, the rolling of the hands. 
• This was the first time Gargano had ever been called Two-Hands to his face. He did not under stand the reference.
• * “Democracy is this: democracy is that the men of the government are no longer the masters of the people. They are the servants of the people. What makes a man master of another man? It is that he pays him for his work. Who pays the men in the government? The people do, for they pay the taxes out of which you are paid. “Therefore you are now the servants of the people of Adano.
• * Probably you think of him as one of the heroes of the invasion; the genial, pipe-smoking history-quoting, snappy-looking, map-carrying, adjective-defying divisional commander; the man who still wears spurs even though he rides everywhere in an armored car;... But I can tell you perfectly calmly that General Marvin showed himself during the invasion to be a bad man, something worse than what our troops were trying to throw out... his deep bass voice (you’ve read about that voice in the supplements; it’s famous; one writer said it was like “a foghorn gone articulate”)
• Errante’s mule was a cautious creature, just as wary of ditches on the right as of ditches on the left. This was a quality in his mule of which Errante Gaetano often boasted to his friends. “Give me none of your lopsided mules,” he would say, “give me a mule with a sense of the middle.” <> This sense was going to be the undoing of his mule just now, because General Marvin’s face was beginning to grow dark, and some veins which have never been described in the supplements began to wriggle and pound on his forehead.
• Before the first of them reached the door, Major Joppolo said: “I wish to tell you that I will do all that is in my power to have this unjust order revoked.” <> And when the comic-looking officials of Adano went out of the door of the Major’s office, they were still sad but they were for him.
• Galioto Bartolomeo is so thin that you can count the several teeth of his mouth even when his lips are closed.
• “What’s this Major to you?” Schultz said. “If he can’t have any fun, what’s he to you?”
  Sergeant Trapani said: “Oh, nothing, I just hate to see a guy get in trouble when he’s trying to do right.”
  Schultz said: “Well, then, why don’t you let the order get lost in Captain Purvis’s papers? Don’t bother me, God, I feel awful.”
• * “You’d better come, he’s going to call on old Tomasino, who hates authority,” they shouted. <> “The mountain is going to Mohammed,” they shouted. And the crowd grew.
• Here Major Joppolo got angry. “Old fisherman,” he said, you will have to understand something. The people of Adano are hungry. They must have fish. Do you get that through your thick skull?”
• * “But Tomasino, you’ve just admitted that I was different from other men of authority. You could be different too. It is possible to make your authority seem to spring from the very people over whom you have authority. And after a while, Tomasino, it actually does spring from them, and you are only the instrument of their will. That is the thing that the Americans want to teach you who have lived under men who imagined that they themselves were authority.”
• On the seventh morning, the Sergeant made him repent for having forced his will on two young girls of the town. <> And so, day after day, the repentances went. And every day the crowd outside Sergeant Borth’s office in the Fascio grew, and the laughter got louder and louder.
• Well, I heard the other day that after the U.S. Army was around these Italian towns for a while there was going to be a pot on every chicken.” <> The Captain roared with laughter. Giuseppe, although he had no idea what the point was, laughed politely. The Major was horrified.
• Major Joppolo had made up his mind that Tina’s hair was dyed. But he didn’t expect her to talk about it. Tina sensed his embarrassment. “Oh, my hair is not natural, Mister Major. I dyed it because I was not satisfied. My dark hair was my Bronx. Every one had dark hair. I wanted something different.”
• “No, being a tax collector did not make you rich in New York. I was earning twenty dollars a week. That’s two thousand lira.”... “I did all right, too, only then they elected a man named LaGuardia, and since he was a different party from the previous man, a lot of people got thrown out, and I was one. I borrowed some money from my motherin-law -”
• The family of Tomasino and their guests spent the next five minutes on their hands and knees picking up the chicken feathers. When that was done Rosa said to Tomasino: “Sad one, put the girls to bed.” Tomasino led the little ones out without gentleness.
• The Major left. Captain Purvis tried to pick up where he left off, but pretty soon Tina came in with tears in her eyes and told Francesca in Italian what had happened, and Rosa came in and asked where the Major was, and Tomasino came back from putting the little ones to bed, and Captain Purvis ran out of finger talk, which parents can understand as well as daughters. And so he got up and left too.
• Chuck said: “Take a drink, have a think.”
  Polack said: “Get a stink, take a drink.”
  Chuck said: “Jeez, that’s hard, to think of somethin’ good enough for that goddam Major.”
• Lord Runcin clapped his snuffbox shut and stood up. “Well, Joppolo, sounds to me as if you were doing a wizard job here. Keep it up. If you have any troubles, just give me a buzz.” And His Lordship left, on the verge of a delicious sneeze which he had been saving in his nostrils for ten minutes.
• Major Joppolo said, and his voice was much softer: “I’m not Italian, boys. I’m American, and sometimes I’m not as proud of it as I’d like to be.”... The Major said: “I’m going to make this your punishment: to have this man’s unhappiness on your conscience, and from now on to keep his house as clean as if everything in it belonged to your own mother.
• * Then, in the heat of the day, they would tempt the Americans with cool-looking fruits, and would sell them for anywhere from ten to twenty times the proper prices. It got so bad that city people would buy what little fruit did reach the town market, and would take it out into the country to sell it to the foolhardy Americans. <> To stop, or at least to curb, the black market, Major Joppolo did three things: he put the town out of bounds to American soldiers, who from then on could enter only on business; he had the Carabiniers stop all foodstuffs from leaving the town; and he fined anyone caught selling over-price or under-measure three thousand lire - a lifetime’s savings for a poor Italian peasant
• “I wish I had thrown it away,” Lieutenant Butters said. “I didn’t have the guts. I put it in the courier pouch for Algiers. You know how much stuff we’ve been losing on that run. I thought maybe -”
• THERE was no better index to the state of mind of Adano than the activities of the painter Lojacono... Whenever the town was optimistic, Lojacono worked. When the town was blue, Lojacono was idle.
• The white-haired Lojacono suffered when he painted. First he suffered the pangs of creation, then he suffered when the people of Adano criticized his work. His work was beautiful and everyone in the town loved it, but for some reason they always criticized it first... But soon he warmed to the town’s happiness, and he did things he had never been able to do in his life, which had not been short.
• My boat has been named Tina since the girl was born. It will remain Tina. The leaves and the fruit which dangle from the name are good enough for me, even if they are not new. You would think that Christ had come again, with all this fresh paint.”
• * And this shows the purpose of the criticism: it was not so much that the people did not like what Lojacono was doing, as that they wanted to know exactly what was in his mind. In future, showing off his boat, Agnello would be able to say: “You can see how fast the porpoise is going by the way the Mister Major is leaning forward. And do you see how white his skin is? That is because of the symbolism in the Mister Major’s skin.”
• Tomasino turned on her: “Girl, by the same reasoning which made your mother force me to go to the Mister Major against my will, I now order you to go to him also.” <> Tina lowered her head and said: “Well, if you order me…” Agnello said afterwards that he thought by the way she said this, she really wanted to go all along.
• After the trucks, his mind focused for a few moments on the figure of Gargano, Chief of the Carabinieri, who was directing traffic about half way down the Via Umberto the First. Errante said to himself: “Even if Gargano can talk three times as fast as anyone else - once with his mouth, once with his left hand, and once with his right - I do not like him.”
• Well, I heard that they belong to a little motor ship that has a cargo of sulphur and some other stuff this town really needs. I just thought that maybe one of these weeks when your floating dry dock isn’t too busy, you could raise her and the town would have the cargo and you’d probably have to drop your job and be mayor, you’d be so damn popular.”
• “He doesn’t want it, this Major of ours wants it, that’s what makes me mad. Old Runcin seems to think I’m a one-man shopping service, and he goes around recommending to people to write me all their screwy things they want.” “Well, what does this guy want?” “Jesus, Ham, he wants a bell.”
• Then Gargano told, or rather acted out, the story of how Errante Gaetano’s cart had blocked traffic on Via Umberto the First. Gargano the Two-Hands leaped and swore and shook his two fists at Errante, and he made Zito act as the mule, and he attacked Zito fiercely, and then he reeled back from sham blow after sham blow. He did not ask anyone to act out the part of Errante, but let his own dodging and staggering give the idea. <> He painted a terrible picture of the unknown but possible consequences of Errante’s holding up the procession of amphibious trucks. He himself seemed to die several times as he imagined the deaths of American boys which resulted from the bone-headedness of this cartman.
• he peered into the camera. <> His muffled voice came out from under the cloth. “Even upside down you are ugly. Usually I like faces much better upside down, but not yours. You are ugly right side up and upside down.
• So the Major went and breathed deeply in various points of the harbor. His final breathing point was alongside the motor ship Anzio. “And now,” he said, “who is for going back to work?” <> All but two of the workmen reported back to work. One was the stranger, who had disappeared. The other was the lazy Fatta. He had had enough for one day.
• His story was nicely told and his audience was just right. The Navy has a quick sense of tradition. All the folderol -saluting the quarter deck, the little silver buck to mark who should be served first in the wardroom, still calling the captain’s court of justice going before the mast, the marvelous poetic orders like: “Sweepers, man your brooms: clean sweepdown fore and aft” -these things made Navy men able to grasp the idea of the bell, and be moved by it.
• Commander Robertson went on: “There’s a reason why the Corelli’s in on this invasion. You see, the Navy thinks about that kind of thing. There was something about Captain Corelli, the guy it was named for, he did something in the last war over here in the Mediterranean. Italy was our ally then, you know.”
• * The men did not break into a run. The women ran toward the men. There was equal happiness on both sides, it just happened that most of the men knew their women would be there, whereas some of the women were not sure that their men would be there. That was the difference. That is why the women ran. <> There were among those women some who knew that their men were dead. They were just running forward in order to share the incredible happiness, or even the doubt, of the other women. Doubt was better than what they had.
• * When the prisoners saw the Major, some of them ran forward, shouting: “American! American!” They hugged him and some kissed him, and there were bread crumbs on his face when they got through with him.
• Some of the women with dead husbands embraced the first men they reached, just to taste a little of this sensation that they had wanted so much. But the men rejected them and went looking for their own.
• * Nicolo said: “The artillery was bad. They say you stop living for a moment when you sneeze. When a shell goes off near you, you have the same kind of paroxysm, and when you come out of it, you know you have been dead for a moment. You can’t go on dying like that many times a day, day after day, and be the same. Think what it would be like if you sneezed twenty times an hour, twenty-four hours a day, for days and days on end. Even that would be terrible, and there is hardly any fear in a sneeze.”
• he said that in a war a man’s honor was not measured by medals, because they were given out unjustly, but by the amount he could do for his nation. He said that killing two Germans helped rather than hurt Italy (perhaps, as things have turned out, we should have killed more) and that the best thing we could do would be to preserve ourselves for our country’s next battle. So we slipped into a bivouac and picked out two Germans and killed them in a quiet way which Giorgio showed me, and we got back to Sicily.”
• Nicolo said: “Tina, I have been beside many men who died in this war and no one of them ever mentioned a woman when he died. Men do not talk that way when they die. They talk about their stomachs and they swear, but they do not mention the names of women.
• I am ashamed of myself, and the shame I feel and the awful shame the drunks feel and all Italian soldiers feel - we were weak, Tina - the shame will hurt our country for many years. Our only chance is to remember men like Giorgio. If we couldn’t go down fighting the way he wanted us to, we can remember the ones like him who did.”
• Lojacono said: “Sometimes I think you are a ridiculous little man. The big things come from the little things. I am not finished. There is something about officials that makes them poke their noses, which are usually asleep on their faces, into unfinished matters.”...
• “In the chin, there will be strength, in the ears, alertness, in the fix of the hair, neatness, in the cheeks, a sympathetic warmth. You will like it,” the old man said. “So will he.”...
• The painter said: “You will not see the big things until you have seen the portrait for some time, just as you did not recognize them in the man until you got to know him. Why list them? You know what they are as well as I do.”..
• The old man said: “There is only one big thing, really. All the others are tied up in it. It is the wish, which is visible in this man’s face, that each person in this town should be happy.
• Another of Tomasino’s helpers said: “Sconzo liked parties. Except for his nose he was handsome.” Agnello and Merendino were just as dead as Sconzo, but their deaths seemed less terrible since they were not missing, as Tomasino put it. That is why the men talked about Sconzo as they went in, and not about the other two.
• Then he turned to the woman and said: “I hope you will not hate the Americans because of this thing. Please try to remember in your grief that the reason the children were out there, running into danger, was that the Americans have been generous with them, too generous. If the Americans did not throw candies to them, they would not keep on running beside the trucks and begging. Sometimes generosity is a fault with Americans, sometimes it does harm. It has brought high prices here, and it has brought you misery. But it is the best thing we Americans can bring with us to Europe. So please do not hate the Americans.”
• * At the head of the procession there were three carts. The first two carried the bodies of Agnello and Merendino. Their coffins were small dinghies such as the fishermen used to get out to their boats, with the tops planked over. The third cart, which was for Sconzo, carried a dinghy which was not planked over, but was filled with flowers.
• Gargano grabbed one of his own ears with one hand and pointed at an ear in the picture with the other: “In the ears there is alertness.”
  Saitta the street-cleaner said approvingly: “In the fix of the hair there is neatness.”
  And finally old Bellanca remembered enough of his coaching to say. “In the cheeks there is a sympathetic warmth.”
• if he had planned a farewell speech, he couldn’t have done better. <> “Children of Adano,” he said, “I am sorry to have to tell you that there are no caramels here.” There was a brief wail of protest... Marco son of Manifattura, one of the smaller ones who had been cheated, said: “Because he was selfish.” “Marco is right. Marco says that the Calvi boy was killed because he was selfish. Marco, you are exactly right. That is what Gargano wanted to tell you, isn’t it, Gargano?”... And then the Major added: “I want you to be happy together. I want all of you to have as much as you can of what you want, without hurting anyone else. That is what I want in Adano.”
• “Yes,” the Major said. He looked over the hills across the sea, and the day was as clear as the sound of the bell itself, but the Major could not see or think very clearly. “Yes,” he said, “eleven o’clock.”

折周前一本《浮木行人》看完就忘了，《天生乙方》又显单薄，这本倒真的是渐入佳境，带给人说谎精迟到的春天。两人屏着扑克脸尔虞我诈之中的酸涩很是我的茶，自带悬疑的 ‘原来真失忆’梗也蛮新鲜的。

>> 导演宁沛是个个性直爽的人，当场脸色不虞，有气直接出：“不识字啊？”
林思弦没忍得住，笑出了声，被旁边的苏红桃戳了一下。她压低声音：“周围的人都没敢笑。”
“他自己讲笑话，”林思弦无辜道，“不怪我。”

何止是对，简直是明智，简直是神来之笔。
失忆一点都不可耻，还非常有用。

等陈寄和助理走出房间后，原本打算离开的三人反而停步在原地。
刚才那振聋发聩的“不拘小节”仿佛还停留而耳畔，化成一道有形的风，朝着扶满脸上利落一扇。

林思弦感谢自己虽摔过但依旧好用的大脑，巧妙绕过这个坑：“我看那天我喝的没加糖，就照原样买了一杯。”

他斟酌了一下自己的言辞，语气却坦然：“那这样行吗？以前如果有我冒犯到您的地方，我给您道个歉，不管以前发生了什么，现在这个身份，我也给您添不上什么麻烦，咱们桥归桥，路归路，我没几天的戏份，拍完就走，也不会留在这儿添堵。”

“那倒不是，”果然陈寄接着讲，“以前高中有个同学，从不带伞也不喜欢淋雨，一定要我替他打伞，遇到水沟还要我背他过去，如果我没带的话，会命令我淋雨去买一把过来，否则就会发脾气，久而久之我出门前一定会看天气，即使不下雨也会常备一把伞在书包里。”

来回几十公里，陈寄只在下车时说了声“谢谢”，仿佛自己真的只是一个称职的司机——如果不是林思弦两次忘拉手刹，调个头得倒五次方向盘。
林思弦事后总结，这件事只能有两种解释：一是陈寄年近三十突然爱上了坐碰碰车，二是陈寄就是单纯享受使唤和命令自己的报复感。

昔关没有什么活力，用乏态来形容建筑也许不太合适，但这里大至常年在修建中的工地，小到从早到晚都只亮黄色的信号灯，在数字基建的时代它像一卷停滞不前的旧磁带，辉腾正穿梭在它的磁道上，让车上的人恍惚间以为还在十几年前。

老爷子在局里那套向来都带回家里，一桌饭吃得不像家宴，更像工作汇报，任务也是分配好的，斟茶的，献墨宝的，切水果的。吕如清是这栋楼里唯一不用进厨房的女性，她靠那几年的轻歌曼舞和林泓近来的事业为自己争取了这一特权，林思弦的小姨跟她说话语气像在问候上级。

看久了总结出一些规律，他/她很喜欢用花草等植物当喻体，描写蓬勃，描写凌厉，描写生命力；也经常写到尘埃和沙石，来具象化那些不值得被在意的事物。这不禁让林思弦有些好奇这个人生活在什么环境里。
如果天降一个杀手，用枪指着林思弦脑袋，告诉他必须对一个人一五一十讲自己的真心话，否则就一枪崩掉，那他会选这个连名字都不知道的人。林思弦说不清，但就是会选他。

那幅《迎春天》是林思弦烧的，也许还有其他的办法，但林思弦懒得去想。他蹲下来，将打火机的外层火焰引到颜料上，春天正式燃烧起来。
他不要春天到来，他要自己此生唯一的礼物留在冬天的墙上。

林思弦听见自己的声音：“嗯。”
好像又听到陈寄的声音：“我更讨厌你这种从头假到尾的人。”
下山的路也颠簸，轮胎压过树木的影子，碾碎一抔又一抔脏泥。

春末的风温度不冷不热。
陈寄站在原地，似乎明白了情况，略有嘲讽地反问：“就因为我说没把你放在眼里？小学生也不至于那么幼稚。”

林思弦当然没打算做慈善。所谓的关照不过是提醒。告知陈寄所有的果篮都有标价，而这些价格都需要陈寄来支付。
这个道理他跟陈寄都很明白。

“林思弦，”陈寄平静地提示他，“你在网上就可以看。”
“我知道呀，”林思弦说，“但我不喜欢在网上阅读。”
三天之后，林思弦得到了他需要的东西。他很熟悉的字体誊抄的几首陌生的诗，写得很工整，连一个错字都没有，只有几笔写得太重，将那几页白纸戳出了几个小洞。

陈寄没有理他，只是非常利落地将一瓶巧克力牛奶和饭卡放在了林思弦桌上，之后转身离开。
娄殊为惊觉这世道越发离奇，下毒都这么明目张胆。

从初夏到现在，林思弦跟陈寄“和睦相处”快一学期。语文课代表都被他们俩的关系所打动，曾提出想以他们化敌为友的故事做案例，出一期“以和为贵”主题的板报，提倡同学们多向优秀范例学习。
林思弦听完十分感动，然后亲切地拒绝了他。
林思弦承认自己的报复手段也许有些幼稚，但他乐在其中。既然陈寄先提出讨厌他说谎的姿态，那他便可以问心无愧地对陈寄提出那些要求，因为那些无理的要求皆是真心实意。
他就是想在奇怪的时间点想吃香草布丁，就是想在出行无忧的情况下买一辆合眼缘的老破车，就是想在某个寒夜不看地图以自己稀烂的技术骑车乱行。而这些肆无忌惮的后果，通通交由陈寄来承担。

林思弦说了太多谎，以至于他也快分不清哪句是真，哪句是假。
譬如现在，看到林泓即将组建一个新家庭，他依旧能跟照相馆的人聊得有来有回，依旧照常坐在了英语课堂上，他不知道自己是不应该在意，还是真的对此毫无波澜。
临近下课时雨也一直没停。林思弦讨厌雨，只觉得地面在溶解，骨骼也快被浇化。

但这次又是例外。林思弦例外地问了，还例外地遭到了拒绝。
或许因为那是陈寄。林思弦这样分析着。因为是跟他彼此讨厌的陈寄，而明明自己才是在这段憎恶关系中占领上风的人，所以这份例外、这两次拒绝才让他无法忽视。

林思弦走回楼梯间，大脑里的河流洪水爆发，他一时间思绪万千。
原来陈寄讨厌说谎的人是因为这个。
原来贫穷的人晚餐几道菜都得取舍。
原来有的父母即使被骗也能观察出孩子喜欢吃什么。

如果一个诚实的人会怎么做？告诉陈寄，我原本有这打算，但我此刻同情你同时又羡慕你，我为讨厌我的人发善心，结果被他抡到了墙上？
下辈子林思弦也说不出来。
“我腿本来就很长，”于是林思弦只用学来的话反击他，“别人的事情，跟你没关系吧。”

“得，”苏红桃放弃刨根问底，自顾自吃起饭来，“匹诺曹见到你都要觉得自己这鼻子长得太冤。”

当然林思弦也理解，当时的他只活了短短十几年，对人生、社会和世事流转的认知都很片面，不屑于填写未来幻想，以为他之所想就是事之所成。
少年人对时间毫无概念，潦草地轻视了几千个日子能发生的一切。

林思弦不知道该怎么面对陈寄，这对于他来说还挺罕见的。见机行事、见风使舵是他的长项，但陈寄揭穿他后，船突然就这么翻了，而林思弦就像溺水一样张不开口。

陈寄终于笑了：“你确实是天赋型演员。”
陈寄来昔关后笑了两次，都是被他气的，林思弦不知道该不该夸自己一句能干。

奈何都开得规矩，林思弦只能回答：“还行，说了挺多话的。”
咄咄逼人怎么不是话，打胡乱说怎么不是说。

“装失忆用过了，”陈寄说，“换点新招。”
太久没得到回答，陈寄又说：“装聋也试过了。”视线里看到林思弦一副难受的模样，继续贴心地补充：“头疼也说过了。”

自此，同情与嘲笑成了林思弦生命的违禁词。哪怕后来老爷子倒台，吕如清去世，林思弦一无所有时也依旧没办法适应。
咬牙切齿也要不卑不亢，筋疲力尽也要从容不迫。
劣质的自尊对一个两手空空的人来说毫无意义，但那也是林思弦仅剩的东西了。

可是刚才他真的没说谎，他不知道自己犯了什么错，不仅仅是退学，这几年他也不知道自己到底走错了哪一步才来到了荒唐的今天，就算在心里建个法庭，也不清楚该怎么给自己判刑。
胸腔里有股酸意，林思弦下意识抓住了他的衣摆。
你不能走。
我没说谎，你不能走。
林思弦想讲这样的话，但这些属于他的屏蔽词了，他声带继续罢工，只有几根无力的手指徒劳拉着那一块布料。

他不顾浑身酸痛从床上怵然坐起，环顾周围，这优秀劳改营一样规整的房间，正是某位变态洁癖的下榻处。

或许是因为生活确实拮据，又或许是因为得知扶满和苏红桃在他看不到的地方为他争取——坎坷多年，麻木已经成了一种保护机制，尽管仍在为自己谋求机会，但已不会再有无妄的期待，接受未来长期为果腹而挣扎的现实。杀青那晚，扶满真挚跟自己说“长风破浪会有时”，林思弦笑着回答“借你吉言”，却不曾相信其中任一字。
然而却真的有人把这句话当真。
在这样的真挚里，自己那可悲的、廉价的、与他苟存的自尊心，突然显得有些可笑。

林思弦思忖了片刻回答：“不是都套出来了吗？我小时候人比较幼稚，当时少不更事对你，嗯，对您做了一些不够成熟的事情，实在抱歉。我这个人虚伪、懦弱又缺乏责任心，所以想要逃避责任，可惜脑子不够聪明，手段有点拙劣，还是被拆穿了。”"

陈寄笑了。这个人笑的时候不多，多数时是在嘲讽自己。此刻的笑相似却不尽然，恍惚看也尽显轻蔑，多看几眼又仿佛透露某种释然。

不用了。不用了。不用了。
“我靠，”林思弦睁眼，拍拍自己的脸，白天没忍心下的手还是在此刻下了，“你到底有什么好在意的。”

“其实我一直也有猜测过，不过也只是猜猜，”苏红桃看着他，眼睛亮晶晶的，“直到那一天，彭骁跟我们喝酒那一天，你醉得不行了，我去扶你的时候，你突然自言自语，说‘陈寄，你抱我一下’。”

他喜欢陈寄吗？怎么可能。当年做那些事情，是讨厌陈寄；这两天的失落，是因为被拒绝的愤怒和前途未卜的不安。
他不可能喜欢陈寄的。
至少在年少那些心跳如鼓、血液翻涌的时刻，他从来都是这么欺骗自己的。

林思弦再一次意识到，只要自己不留恋、不执着、不在意，很多事情就通通变得简单起来。就像于蕊对他出于同情的善意，是她为人善良的一环，几次季节交换，花开花落，这些往事本就应该被代谢掉，不必停驻，不必苛求。

之前林思弦也让陈寄背过他一次，因为一场大雨，学校管道堵塞，有很大一片积水，林思弦不想弄脏自己的鞋。但或许是生病怕冷的原因，林思弦总觉得今天陈寄的脊背尤其暖和，他双臂不自觉地用力，听到陈寄说：“你摔不下去，放松，我呼吸不了。”
今天天气不错，天上挂着一轮清晰的月亮。
林思弦看着两人的影子，心里一边想，还是得救了，一边想，陈寄肯定烦死自己了。

在一个寻常的夜晚，在一辆寻常的出租车上，林思弦意识到一件不寻常的事。他始终坚信跟陈寄之间，是自己在享受权利的快感，享受作弄的乐趣，却无意中让自己一次又一次被陈寄拯救。
林思弦知道这是一个需要被纠正的错误，但长期紧绷的意志囚困在沙漏的玻璃罩里，窥见一个缺口便没有骨气地流淌而下，一时之间很难遏止。所以他的掌心握着陈寄的腕骨，决定再将错就错一次，改日再修正这个巨大失误。

或许现在也是修正错误的时机，但他还是没能说出口，只是在心中决定，以后再也不来湖滨公园了。
“告诉你个好消息，”林思弦说，“下周开始我一天只来两天学校了，周末估计也在外地。”
陈寄看着窗外，良久才应了一句：“嗯。”

没回学校的一个月里，他一次都没跟陈寄联系，又偏偏在很多时刻唐突地想到陈寄。在看到绕成一团的耳机线的时候，在看到那支钢笔的时候，又或者是现在，酒吧二层窗户刚好正对一座钟塔，下面有很多拿着气球的情侣。
又是一个元旦，林思弦想起来的也不是别的片段，就是他把那束花扔进垃圾桶的那一天。他们只是擦肩而过的路人，但陈寄看他的眼神还历历在目。林思弦又很唐突地想起了《一个陌生女人的来信》的台词，他曾经练习时读过，“我仿佛是你口袋里的怀表”——想到这句话多半是楼下这座钟塔的原因。

林思弦就在这一刻得出了答案。
过去这段时间里，他用了太多拙劣的借口、重复的拖延，来给造成他不合理思绪的真正本因做粉饰，然后得之不易的假象在这一瞬间随大理石纹碎裂。他知道他躲不了了，心跳随笔落入深渊总不能再骗自己是心疼这三千块。
他在确认自己喜欢陈寄的同时，确认他在被喜欢的人讨厌着。
但又如何呢？连亲人都讨厌他，再多一个喜欢的人又不会怎样。

林思弦突然上手，抚摸他小臂凸起的血管，能感受到对方僵硬的肌肉。手沿着袖口往上，最后在肩膀停住。最后他像当初对衣架那样，将下颌轻轻放在陈寄的肩上。
人跟衣架果然不同，哪怕再不配合，骨骼和体温也是真实的。
“就这么讨厌我啊，”林思弦说，“但怎么办呢？我就见不得你得逞。”
当坏人有当坏人的好，林思弦将头沉得更深一点。他要到了除表演以外第一个有记忆的怀抱，不用对此辩解，不用对此遮掩。反正他轻浮又恶劣，秉性难改。

看着替自己抄错题的陈寄，修长的手指握着一支普通圆珠笔，林思弦很想用自己的手替换那支笔，填入对方的指缝；看着陈寄在给饮水机换水时显得很宽阔的肩膀，林思弦很想让他坐在自己身边，倚靠在上面度过一下午的时光……
直到放任自己沉溺于最直接的幻想时，林思弦才明白，那些亲密的动作是不需要靠看影视作品一帧一帧学习的，他内心的渴望会告诉他要做什么、应该怎么做。

“没什么，刚才做了个噩梦，”被谎言填充的真实世界让林思弦平静下来，朝陈寄笑笑，“梦到蹦迪的时候被人打了。”

林思弦站起身来，很亲昵地环抱陈寄，贴在对方身上，他尽自己所能地汲取着对方的一切，味道、气息、皮肤的温度，餍足得很想就此沉没在其中。嘴里说出来的是另一番台词：“怎么这副表情，明天开始放假，你两周见不到我，不应该很高兴吗？”
只要不被发现就好。
林思弦像所有抱有侥幸心理的犯罪者，既割舍不下诱惑又不敢承担风险，只能努力掩盖自己的罪行。

几秒后，他察觉到陈寄的双臂覆盖在他背上，不是一个温柔的怀抱，这双手很用力，发泄般将他禁锢住，骨骼相撞有些疼。这人好傻，林思弦想，自以为在报复，殊不知这点痛感他梦寐以求。
林思弦从没这么感激那些加诸在自己身上的流言，让他可以在轻佻的外壳里尽力描摹他的梦。他变成了一场舞台剧的导演兼编剧，将自己憧憬的分镜一一拍完。
他时间不多，新学期开始每天一对一补习，每半个月才抽出一个下午回学校一次，这半天就是他的片场。他在晚饭时间叫陈寄载他去买布丁，卸了力气靠在陈寄背上，看黄昏下他们跟树木的影子交叠；陈寄坐教室最后一排，他去当短暂的半日同桌，陈寄认真做题，他趴在桌上用指尖勾画对方的青筋。
当然，就像辛德瑞拉一样，总会有一个结束的时间点。做完这些事，林思弦总会轻飘飘补上一句：“你别总是冷着一张脸，你配合一点也许我就没兴趣了，就会换个目标了呀。”

感受到熟悉体温的刹那，林思弦身体里的血液好像开始重新流动起来。或许这就是肢体接触的意义，在这个世界上，他的出生是虚伪的，他的家庭是虚伪的，他说过的话都是虚伪的，但这个拥抱是真实存在的——尽管这个拥抱的理由也是不可言说的。

林思弦第一次尝试戒断坚持了半年，往后这个时长逐渐缩减，三个月、两个月、一周，他又像高中时那样，用各种各样的理由逼迫陈寄跟他见面。...
林思弦并不承认是自己太喜欢陈寄，到了真的缺他不可的地步。只是自己太争强好胜，不能接受在自己没能迭代掉陈寄之前，陈寄先把他忘掉。

对于初吻来说，它的确有些残酷和不合格，但依旧让林思弦回味至今。陈寄问他“够了吗”的一瞬间，他心中骤然冒出一种荒诞的假设，如果他不是林思弦，应该会怎样回答？
不够，远远不够，对我更残暴一点吧，再施舍我一点温柔，让我也可以温顺地待在你身边。
不过他顷刻间便意识到这是个悖论，没有这个家庭，他根本没有要挟陈寄的手段，他跟陈寄也绝走不到今天；而出生在这个家庭，就注定他只能是林思弦。
所以最后他也只能给出属于林思弦的回答：“干嘛这么用力，你吻技真的好差。”

她说得很简单，按她的脾气绝不想这样轻易放过林泓，没想到后者比她更为决绝。只是林思弦没预料到她会哭，不知是不是母子间的心灵感应，他这一秒甚至明白她哭的原因——为她绝不承认的爱，彻底被屠戮的悲哀。

林思弦在这一刻倏然释怀。他觉得自己比想象中要容易满足，吕如清给了他一小部分亲情，他收下了；陈寄在这个夜晚留给他迟到的五分钟，他也决定收下。

这也许是他们最后一次见面，林思弦忽然察觉到这一点。于是他多看了陈寄两秒，他的眼睛，他的鼻子，他唯一一次亲过的嘴唇，不过也只能看两秒，再多就不太对了。
林思弦说：“拜拜，希望你以后别碰到我这种无理取闹的人。”
也希望我总有一天能够彻底忘记你。

他知道他没理由拒绝。过去这么多的日夜里，别人问起来都可以轻描淡写代过，唯独骗不了自己，从质问每一次苦痛的理由，到惯性接受每一次无理由的苦痛，也曾焦虑过，后来发现焦虑也不起作用，他甚至很久没再给自己买过一次布丁；既然陈寄开了这个口，也许能换的不只是打酱油的角色，主角不敢肖想，至少也有名有姓，日后简历不至于看不过去；甚至如果他够坦诚的话，他曾在无数个恼人的梦里，无意识幻想与陈寄完成这一步。他的祈愿从不成功，忘掉陈寄那次也同理。

错觉间林思弦有很多想说，你头发有几缕没擦到还在滴水，你背上怎么青了一块，你干嘛这么卷把肌肉练成这样，你明早几点走……太日常了，日常到随意，随意到亲密，就不合时宜了。于是他什么都没说，两个人继续共享房间的沉默。

到这一步还算顺畅，再往后剧本就断了。电影里到这一步权贵已经按捺不住把人揽住拥吻，但陈寄依旧泰然站在原地，审视他的一举一动，好像他做得并不够格，只有微小的变化印证他那句“我是个有正常需求的Gay”。吻就算了，这种步骤得省略，林思弦跪在床边，手碰到对方裤子上的松紧绳，系得不算紧，但他还是失败好几次。大概陈寄终于等得不耐烦，伸手帮他，在绳索松开的刹那，林思弦看到了陈寄右手掌心那道疤，经年未消的疤。
一种无比诡异的酸楚蔓延至全身。湖滨公园，水池，形体室，被挤压的记忆顷刻膨胀。
他做不到。
就算有无数个继续下去的理由，也抵挡不了一丝微弱而悲恸的反抗。他做不到。就算生命完全坍塌，他也要给曾经千疮百孔的真心留最后一片完土。

察觉到眼眶里有些湿润，林思弦将生理性的泪水在枕头上蹭掉。视线里窗外月亮高悬，俯视这房间里荒唐的一切。林思弦知道，他以往渴望的梦正在此刻被塑造成现实，但又那么截然不同。要真是梦就好了，梦里的角色才是真正脱离实际的化身，梦里陈寄越残酷他越能安心服从，没有其他人，没有爱恨，没有前因后果，只有两个人溺亡在最本质的交汇中。
但现在不行，汗水如此真实，味道如此真实，心里的起落也如此真实。狠毒的力度不是因为自己渴望，而是因为陈寄狠心。

跟谈恋爱不同，他们之间的顺序是反着来的，有可能存在的拥抱、布丁还有那两条信息，是陈寄仁慈的配套关怀，是一场粗野的性的附属品。
然而最绝望的是，他发现他高估了自己。林思弦想把昨晚当成不值一提的意外，又偷偷把那布丁带回房间放好；而附赠的拥抱和关心，让他对陈寄长达七年的戒断又一次成为泡影，让他看到消息时再一次产生徒增烦恼的期待。

林思弦有些庆幸自己跟着他们出来了，他一直是这样，在人多的地方，看着人群的千态万状心里饱和一些，但又很难彻底融入其中。

以至于再说话时，又找到了合适的借口：“没意思，原本今天心情好想捉弄你一下，没想到你竟然学聪明了，也有可能是时间太久我演技退步了。”...
说完就毫不留恋地移开目光，试图从陈寄身边经过，没走两步被拽住衣领，一股蛮力让他几乎是摔进陈寄怀里，手里的果汁再度滑落，这次滚出了很远的距离。
在林思弦意识到这是陈寄第一次主动抱他时，不远处骤然传来炸裂声响，他在陈寄双臂中吓得一颤，扶满他们捣弄了整整半小时的烟花终于腾升至空中。爆燃声太大，以至于林思弦不知道耳边那声叹息是真还是幻觉。

林思弦知道他是一个别扭的人。他习惯跟人维持梳理又客气的关系，没办法像其他人一样坦然大方地接受别人的好意，即使这些好意对施舍者来说也许不值一提。他也依旧会过度眷恋，眷恋到害怕无以为报，眷恋到开始思考他们对自己的善良什么时候会被代谢掉。

“活得尚好，”陈寄把一盒药扔洗手台上，淡然道，“每个跟你睡过的人都知道你这么嘴硬吗？”

他知道，比起承担为了袒护谢洛维承担惹恼彭骁的风险，随手买一盒药对陈寄来说不算什么，但这一盒药又能让他铭记这个夜晚。比起这一天的头疼，这件事好像更让他难以忍受。他对身体发肤之痛的忍耐阈值随岁月增长，而对于陈寄的得失之痛，经过这么多年练习依旧天资愚钝。

见林思弦接过去，许苑又接着说：“那天我也没料到你不知情，也不知道该说些什么，想来想去还是想告诉你，虽然苦难没什么好美化的，但既然发生了也不完全是坏事，至少让未来的好事都显得珍贵一些。”

“他们俩没在，这儿就咱俩，”苏红桃提醒他，“你可以不失忆。”
林思弦深吸一口气，道：“我可能真失忆了。”

林思弦发觉自己陷入了一个魔幻的泥潭。像一些无厘头的奇幻电影，认知的常识围绕自己产生畸变，但完全推理不出任何理由依据。
他不得不确认，他肯定遗忘了跟陈寄有关的一些事情。但要做到什么样的程度，才能让一个恨死自己的人主动出手协助。

大概人无语时都会添加一些范例，来证明自己说的是对的：“当时彭骁跟谢洛维起争执，宁导打电话问陈编意见，陈编本来没什么看法，觉得那段可有可无，删不删都行，让宁沛他们权衡利弊后自己决定。聊到后半途又突然问，如果他俩一直重拍你是不是也得反复落水，得到确认答复后突然改口说那就全删。所以你也别觉得是人家差使你，你付出时间肯定有回报。”

林思弦还从来没像这样茫然过。他突然不知道该用什么样的语气来跟陈寄对话。太复杂了，他跟陈寄之间的关系太复杂了。他颐指气使过，他贪恋过，他求全过，他反抗过，而如今又多了很多，他被强迫过，他又被不知缘由地关心过。

来干嘛。因为我大脑太乱了。所以想见你。
不，大脑不乱的时候，我也一直想见你。只是因为大脑不乱，所以不能见你。

他突然不敢问下去了。林思弦确认在那段时间里，他跟陈寄应该见过面，但并不知道是怎么见的面，不知道见面时他们发生了什么，导致陈寄对他从原本的厌烦，到如今既可怜他、给他好处，又说恨他。

好像被这味道蛊惑，林思弦又往前走了一步。像个小偷一样，在床边蹲下来端详，小偷偷钱，他偷时间，这方面他熟能生巧，他很久以前就开始偷陈寄的时间。

娄殊为比高中时胖了一点，好在脸型不显老，看着跟高中区别不大。但比起外表更恒久不变的是他光滑的大脑皮层，他呆若木鱼般看着林思弦，正当后者在绞尽脑汁想点让场面不尴尬的话时，娄殊为脱口而出：“啊？兄弟，你已经落魄到需要租房子了吗？”
......真是好久不见了。这新鲜的白痴气息。林思弦自然地回答他：“对啊，没想到是熟人，你该不该给我打个折。”

说到陈寄，林思弦已经一个月没跟他再联络。他控制着自己想到陈寄的频率，但也总是在这些细枝末节上破例。不过也只是仓促的一秒，想完便完。行为心理学说二十一天以上的重复会形成习惯，林思弦觉得在理，昔关和昔关发生的一切，再回首已经像尘封往事了。

林思弦不是一个很迟钝的人。有些话说到这种程度，他已经能够推测出谜底，但关心则乱，这件事每个细节都牵动他心弦，导致他一定要像个痴呆的人那般，追问到最后一步，追问到对方不得不直接说出那个很简单的答案：“陈寄喜欢你这么多年，你不会一直都不知道吧？”

陈烁将林思弦拉到拐角处。她初中学校离四十六中很近，曾远远见过林思弦几面，每次这人路过，身边女生总会下意识停住对话，让她好奇地抬头顺着她们的视线望过去——林思弦校服穿得很不规范，几片落叶擦着他飘动的领口而过，一片叶子卡在纽扣上，像一枚栖息的羽毛。林思弦轻轻把叶片拾起，有人叫他的名字，他便维持这个姿势转头，风不轻不重吹过来，指尖的羽毛飞走，林思弦的发丝随风追去，露出他风中荡漾的微笑。
因此，当后来陈烁无意间看到陈寄夜深人静时无声播放林思弦练习的视频，她没有太过意外。那阵风带走了很多，多了份陈寄的心而已。

“说起来我一直以为你俩成了，我妈葬礼刚完，他两天没睡还赶回去看你什么表演。没想到这么多年，竟然全是他一厢情愿。”

他也不知道，那些曾让他反复悲痛、想要代谢掉却始终在心里埋得根深蒂固的往事，竟然还有另一个角度的叙事。

因为太过滑稽的乌龙，因为一而再再而三的错位，还是因为他从来没敢往这个方向想过。从小到大的防御机制让他不会盲目幻想，就像看到林泓去挑婴儿用品，不会想是否有朝一日也能体验一点亲情，没有落差就不会坠落，生活就能顺畅运行。而关于陈寄的事，又是最敏感的一桩，一点失重感都很难承受。
永远在全副武装抵抗陈寄不喜欢他带来的创伤，也同样阻挡了对陈寄喜欢他这件事的洞察。

在陈寄的视角里，自己是一个既拒绝他又反复招惹他的，没心没肺的混蛋。

林思弦不知道陈寄有没有相信这个说辞，而陈寄看起来也对此不想探究：“没关系。你一向如此，拒绝我也不止这一次。还是说你特意提起这个，是有什么别的事要我做？”

林思弦从未如此深刻地领悟什么叫语境。在这样的情形下，就算奋不顾身告知陈寄，我爱你，我爱了你很多年，听着更像趋炎附势、食髓知味的把戏。他甚至找不到任何一桩这份爱存在的证据——比起陈寄做过的事，他连一个拿来证明的案例都说不出来。

林思弦从没想过有朝一日会听到陈寄告白，用告别般决绝的语气。
“还是说你就是心血来潮想亲口听我说这一句，”陈寄的话一字一句凿进林思弦耳里，他又一次满足了林思弦的愿望，“可以啊，林思弦，我是很可笑，喜欢一个擅长差遣我的人，反省过很多次也没办法对你熟视无睹。”

林思弦从未想过，他刻意不去索求的东西一直在等他索取；他也从未想过，在他确认拥有的一瞬间也确认了他失去。

每多看一个字，内心便多一分仓皇。直到拿信的手无力垂落，林思弦开始回忆陈烁告诉自己的话——陈寄得知这封信后，没有生气，什么都没说。
他没有告诉陈烁，他排完三个小时的盲盒交给林思弦后，没有得到恋人般的感谢与亲昵，甚至没有一句温柔的好话。林思弦只是当着他面拆开盲盒，故作不满道地抱怨，陈寄，你运气真差，刚好拿到我不喜欢的这一个。
当然陈寄也不知道，这个丑丑的玩偶未来数个日夜都放在林思弦床头，朝夕相伴。

欺骗别人需要借口、谎言和虚假的表演，而欺骗自己只需要隐瞒、忽略和漫长的逃避。如果躲藏的愿望过于强烈，连记忆都会帮着自我矫饰。

“林思弦，”不知是不是这名字难记，陈寄花了数十秒才叫出来，“我在看你。”
倏然被打断，他不知道该说什么了。有一种奇怪的心情是，他不想拍了，这一幕名叫遗愿的戏，他想删掉其他的场景，只保留这句三个字的台词。

只是他不敢出声，害怕暴露他的稚拙，也不想惊扰这一切。还好房间没有灯，可以藏住他竭力忍耐的神情。陈寄的动作并不轻柔，他只能靠自己去争取一些虚无的怜惜，他抚上对方脊背，又辗转到下颌、鼻尖与眉毛，什么都看不见，但他知道它们是什么样子，他在黑暗里勾勒他再熟悉不过的画面。

迷糊之间一只手掐住了他的脖颈，仿佛某种处刑道具，呼吸变得不顺，放大了本就在极限边缘的知觉，听觉连带着变得敏锐，让陈寄哑声说出的话异常清晰：“林思弦，你到底想怎么样？”
我想怎么样呢？我想让你更残酷一些，让你从我身上掠夺得更多一些，让它们在你这里保留得更长远一些。

林思弦胸口一滞，笑着问陈寄：“陈寄，你还跟以前那样讨厌我啊？怎么，下次不打算理我了？”
陈寄没有看他，声音停留在空中：“我哪次没理你。”
林思弦回忆了一下，好像是这样。然而这个事实没有让他欣慰，反而让他一点一点淹没下去，被窗外的黄昏谋杀。
我好讨厌陈寄啊。他想。我怎么会这么讨厌陈寄啊。

汗从额角滑落，浸湿了他的睫毛，他在模糊中回忆那晚的陈寄，像又被滚烫的汗水浸润了一遍。刚才看过的诗句降临在耳边——
“身体里的铁，只够打一枚钢钉，留给我飘泊一世的灵魂，就钉在爱人的心上。”

来这里的理由有很多，日复一日的疲倦，冷暖自知的琐碎，对彻底安宁的向往，而反抗的理由只有不想。不想被洗刷、不想被迭代、不想被遗忘。不想就这么消融在所有人的眼里。
他什么都不能做，但他还能存在。存在在当下，存在在雨里，存在在于蕊的碑前，也许有朝一日存在在吕如清念念不忘的台上，存在在面前那块正在招商的广告牌里。
金融中心也有个旋转餐厅，陈寄也许会去那里跟人约会，像他那样的人一定会提前预定窗边位置，会为对方拉开座椅，他们会分享晚餐，会聊未来，会度过整个夜晚，直到他看见那块广告牌，服务员就在此刻呈上甜点，于是这个夜晚里他分出普通的一秒，想起以前有一个很麻烦的人，每天指使自己去买讨厌的慕斯蛋糕。
他要为这幻想中的、不切实际的一秒活下去。

他想到他从“一叶”出来，看见门口摆了一排看不出是猫头鹰还是猫的劣质摆件，因为售价太贵所以对它们有些印象，而在陈寄家里看见其中一个的时候，他仅仅只多看的那一眼；
他想到他带给陈寄的每一句自认赎罪的告别，希望不会遇见他这样的人，希望他不要放在心上，希望未来能有人照顾你；
他想到陈寄每次的回应，好，谢谢你，以及你还想我怎么样；
他想到陈寄唯一说过的告白，和唯一说过的告别。

林思弦还知道，他应该做一些他不擅长的事。有时候选择低头不是因为示弱，不是因为妥协，而是不能再次遗失那些不想遗失的东西。
但他太缺乏经验，实在不知该怎么下手，深思熟虑后终于以细若蚊蝇的声音道——
“求你。”
“地址。”
他们在同一秒投降。

陈寄并不想过去。但林思弦长了一双很多情的眼睛，是一个很擅长制造错觉的人，他这样仰头看向自己时，会让人生出一种他真的非常需要对方的认知偏差。所以陈寄又一次被动地听从了对方指令。
林思弦就这样端详了他几秒，然后倏然伸手抱住了陈寄的腰，将头埋在陈寄胸膛上。他抱得很紧，好像要突破万有引力，将全身的重量都托付在他们接触的身体上。
而围绕陈寄的万有引力也再一次消失。
他明白他又自暴自弃了。算了，无论林思弦在这之后是要提出什么要求，抑或是像之前千万次那样嘲笑他都无所谓了。他在林思弦身上做过的蠢事太多，只要是他能解决的事，再多一桩也无妨。

解析林思弦会显得困难很多，因为他的谎言会带来很多虚假的数据。善良又装不善良，逞强又装不逞强，当年有很多懒惰的富贵毛病，但真正病痛或者为了艺考拉伸韧带时又一声不吭。就算如此，通过长期的接触也能掌握一些林思弦的轮廓。
但陈寄唯独理解不了他在自己面前的行为动机。看起来完全有悖于陈寄总结出的属于林思弦的底层逻辑。
就像现在。他抱了陈寄很久的时间，力度大得像很害怕陈寄离开，陈寄问他“为什么累，哪里很难受”时又缄口不言，最后放开时摇摇头：“也没有那么难受。”

林思弦是世界上最擅长自食其言和若无其事的人。说不再见面的是他，突然出现的是他，说让陈寄好好生活的是他，现在突然回到几年前的也是他。

无论是这错觉还是林思弦的行为，都非常的荒谬和不合情理。从表面上看，林思弦做的这些事其实并不奇怪，让陈寄接送他，要求陈寄回消息，或者突如其来的肢体接触，在高中和大学时期，同样的事情不计其数。
但缺乏了旧场景里最核心的部分——林思弦玩弄的语气和不讲情理的任性，以至于让过去几天的片段看起来像一种非常笨拙、非常不得要领的引诱和调情。
很像是已经完成的剧本里，有人用笔划去了一些最关键的描写，让整段情节呈现出另外一个故事。

弥补一个谎言需要诚恳的道歉和合理的解释，弥补很多谎言却不能用这两者的叠加，因为这会让它们看起来像另一个谎言。
在一些瞬间里，本能让林思弦有过和盘托出的荒唐冲动，但他长期的认知又让他把这些冲动压回体内。他不知道怎么证明此刻说的话不是一个谎言。

想跟陈寄之间积累更多像普通人那般平凡又温和的时刻，直到它们覆盖住过往那些不太美好的时间，那时候的真心话才看起来充满真心。

那个在网页上无数次打下“讨厌陈寄”的林思弦，一字一句告诉他：“我只是喜欢你。一直都，很喜欢你。”

“嗯，我上车后十分钟就把你放了出来，”陈寄说，“那地方很偏，我怕你下雨打不到车。”
林思弦隔着水雾去看陈寄的脸，陈寄脸上没什么波澜，只是接着叙述：“现在明白了吗？我不需要你证明的意思，你只用告诉我你想做什么，我不会拒绝你。”
法官终于作出陈述，告诉犯人他才是一直等待宣判的人。

林思弦讨厌日落，讨厌黑夜，讨厌雨天，只喜欢万里无云的晴天，只喜欢世界本身就看起来美好而明媚的样子。而此刻他第一次觉得雨声也悦耳动听，因为他意识到他不再需要阳光的庇佑。

陈寄答应林思弦不会过多干预他的事情，然后在当晚继续找云简那边的熟人确认庞术跟魏易平的现状——毕竟陈寄只是不会拒绝林思弦，但没说不能偷鸡摸狗。

但林思弦说着文不对题的话：“陈寄，你怎么没告诉我你们办公室楼下有喷泉啊？”...
陈寄回头的刹那，看见林思弦站在浮动的光晕里，影子投在湿淋淋的地面上，向自己蔓延。
林思弦还是那个林思弦。水池边作恶的林思弦，喷泉前轮廓模糊的林思弦，永远不分昼夜地让陈寄看到不属于这个世界的彩虹。

林思弦微微一怔，突然意识到他在说谎这个领域的一块短板——掩饰其它得心应手，唯独掩饰不了开心。用再多语言修饰，还是会从呼吸和眼神里流露出来。

但奇怪的是，采访快要开始时对方接了个电话，眼神突然就变了——她文学硕士毕业，竟找不到词汇来描述对方现在的表情。硬要形容的话，仿佛钢铁突然断了承重轴，所有棱角坍缩，影子都不知该往哪个方向倾斜。

“没想到我还留着吧，嘻嘻，忘了扔，还给你。”
“我现在很快乐，大概成熟了吧，看到它觉得以前还蛮对不起你的。”
“所以祝你以后能幸福快乐。”

在一切发展到更不可控的方向前，陈寄短暂尝试过抵抗，遭到了林思弦的威胁。陈寄非常讨厌无能为力的感觉，但无力感并非来源于胁迫，而是在每次林思弦用指尖描摹他血管时，在自尊心、危机感和所有基本认知前，陈寄先看见了他们交叠的双手。

可惜事实刚好相反，只有在柯然身上，找不到和林思弦任何相似之处，他是源自林思弦又独立于林思弦的幻想，是陈寄给自己的无能和遗憾编织的一个完全相反的虚拟补偿，一个林思弦完全属于他、完全依附他的梦。

唯一想到的是，林思弦的纹身真适合他，他确实是体内有钉子的人。痛苦埋藏在体内，无论如何溃烂外表都完好无损。而在那些暗无天日的时刻，那枚钉子又会支撑他鲜血淋漓地走下去，走到陈寄终于认清自己的无能和虚有其表的自尊。

他太自负了。陈寄想。
有时候自负不是狂言妄语，而是自以为强大，自以为可靠，自以为能承受一切苦痛、承担一切后果，所以不必向神佛祈愿也不必向他人索求。
而此刻的陈寄才真正尝到自负带来的代价——他曾差一点永远见不到怀里这个人。

“林思弦，”陈寄没有正面回答他，而是用一种很少在他身上出现的，半命令半祈求的语气说，“别再离开我，不管以什么方式。”

陈寄在这一瞬间意识到，林思弦来找他的那个雨夜其实并没有哭。
林思弦不会因为苦难、慌乱、不安、被拒绝而哭，他的泪水只有一个来源，来自于他确信自己正被陈寄迫切需要的时刻。

他只是庆幸，他在做了很多次错误选择后，终于做了一次对的选择。让迟来的花还来得及开，月色还来得及温柔，而他还能完整地拥有当下。
于是思来想去，林思弦最后又写了更长的一句话：“我真的好喜欢你啊。”

比起陈寄这个人，林思弦更早地喜欢他的字。时隔十年，陈寄的字好像也成熟了一点，但熟悉的笔锋还是没有变。
那些写枯木、写春天、写尘埃的字，在剧本上写着吃早饭、少抽烟、下周末来接你。
还有最后写得最重的三个字——我也是。

前两次陈寄还不知所以，不过林思弦执意要玩这种把戏，他也随意配合。事不过三，陈寄现在好像明白林思弦弄这一出的原因，他可以省掉在陈寄面前最后一层矜持，省掉一些多余的话，就像现在他靠过来，没什么章法地胡乱亲着陈寄的脸，在陈寄不是很温柔地将他推到沙发边缘，手把他原本就泛红的关节箍得更红时，按往常林思弦总得象征性地骂上一两句，但现在依旧只是无声看着陈寄，好像在等待更为残酷的后续。

工事聊完后，佐伊强制着让林思弦加回了她的微信，当着林思弦的面给他发了个鄙夷的表情包。

陈寄觉得很幸运，他的人生竟然也能等到重拍的这一天。七八年前，他从那条林荫道中走过来，看着手捧鲜花的林思弦，听他满不在乎地说“拜拜”；而此时此刻林思弦正从同一条路向他跑来，问他：“你等很久了吗？”

林思弦第一次威胁他去教室的时候，陈寄做好了接受暴｜力的准备，而林思弦在讲台上晃着双腿，嘴边还沾着吃完烤馒头的油，用亮晶晶的双唇告诉陈寄，你看我十分钟。
在后来的很多个十分钟里，陈寄在大巴车上看着林思弦坐在自己身旁，用他理顺的耳机线安静听歌，窗外的云层一晃而过；看着林思弦在前面一摇一晃地骑着车，月亮就悬在头顶的天空上；看着林思弦在形体室夸张念着台词，灯光落在两个人身上，拖出一道很长的影子。
陈寄怨恨过那朵云，怨恨过那枚月亮，怨恨过那道影子，怨恨这些不分场合施加浪漫元素的意象，直到在没有林思弦的白昼和夜晚，云依旧轻盈，月亮始终高悬，陈寄才没有后路地意识到，他最应该怨恨的是他自己。

随着选角导演那一声“林思弦”，属于《黄昏谋杀案》的主角，属于陈寄过去十年和过后无数年的主角，又重新站回了他眼前。

Aldous Huxley's account of a wizard-burning in 17th-century France alternates between being utterly absorbing and tediously abtruse.

• “as we swathe the limbs of an infant in the cradle to give them a right proportion, so it is necessary from his earliest youth to swathe, so to speak, his will, that it may preserve through his life a happy and salutary suppleness.” The spirit of domination was willing enough, but the flesh of propagandist method was weak. In spite of the swaddling of their wills, some of the Jesuits’ best pupils left school to become free thinkers or even, like Jean Labadie, Protestants.
• They taught a peculiarly elegant Latin and the very latest in optics, geography and mathematics, together with ‘dramatics’ (their end-of-term theatricals were famous), good manners, respect for the Church and (in France, at least, and after Henri IV’s conversion) obedience to the royal authority. For all these reasons the Jesuit colleges recommended themselves to every member of the typical upper-class family
• * Such time and energy as were left over from the preoccupation with possessions were devoted to the cosy little monotonies, the recurrent joys and agonies of family life; to gossip about the neighbours; to the formalities of religion and, since Loudun was a city divided against itself, to the inexhaustible acerbities of theological controversy.
• she was the prisoner of a city’s devotion. When she prayed, the sick were often healed. To her shame and mortification, Louise was held responsible for their recovery. “If I ever did a miracle,” she wrote, “I should think myself damned.” After a few years she was ordered by her directors to move away from Loudun. For the people there was now no longer any living window through which the Light might shine.
• * Grandier lived in the grey dawn of what may be called the Era of Respectability. Throughout the Middle Ages and during the earlier part of the Modern period the gulf between official Catholic theory and the actual practice of individual ecclesiastics had been enormous, unbridged and seemingly unbridgeable. It is difficult to find any mediaeval or Renaissance writer who does not take it for granted that, from highest prelate to humblest friar, the majority of clergymen are thoroughly disreputable. Ecclesiastical corruption begot the Reformation, and in its turn the Reformation produced the Counter-Reformation. After the Council of Trent scandalous Popes became less and less common
• * In France, during the whole of the seventeenth century, state policy towards clerical irregularities was the exact opposite of that pursued by the Venetian Senate. Because it was afraid of ecclesiastical encroachment, the latter liked to see its clergymen conducting themselves like pigs and disliked the respectable Jesuits. Politically powerful and strongly Gallican, the French monarchy had no reason to fear the Pope, and found the Church very useful as a machine for governing. For this reason it favoured the Jesuits
• Jean-Jacques Bouchard: only to find that, from time immemorial, the doctors, the philosophers and the theologians had been talking through their mortar-boards and birettas. Menstrual blood did not kill grass, did not tarnish mirrors, did not blast the buds of the vine, did not dissolve asphalt and did not produce ineradicable spots of rust on the blade of a knife... The world revealed by the Confessions is very like the world revealed to us by modern sexologists—but, if anything, a little more so. We see the small fry indulging in sexual play
• In any given set of circumstances our actual behaviour is represented by the diagonal of a parallelogram of forces having appetite or interest as its base and, as its upright, our ethical or religious ideals. In Bouchard’s case... the devotional upright was so short that the angle between the long base and the diagonal of manifest behaviour was of only a very few degrees.
• an adolescent chambermaid. This girl was all virtue while she was awake, but could not, it was obvious, be responsible for what happened while she was asleep. And according to her private system of casuistry, it made no difference whether she was really asleep or merely pretending.
• the Dauphin’s sexual education was not merely verbal. At night the child would often be taken into the beds of his waiting-women—beds which they shared (without nightdresses or pyjamas) either with other women or their husbands...
• * since a seventeenth-century palace was totally without privacy. Architects had not yet invented the corridor. To get from one part of the building to another, one simply walked through a succession of other people’s rooms, in which literally anything might be going on. And there was also the matter of etiquette. Less fortunate in this respect than his or her inferiors, a royal personage was never permitted to be alone.
• * But a priest’s life is not supposed to be well-rounded; it is supposed to be one-pointed—a compass, not a weathercock.
• His vow “does not proceed from his will, but is imposed upon him by the Church, which compels him, willy-nilly, to accept this hard condition, without which he may not practise the sacerdotal profession.” The upshot of all this was that Grandier felt himself at perfect liberty ultimately to marry
• Sex mingles easily with religion, and their blending has one of those slightly repulsive and yet exquisite and poignant flavours, which startle the palate like a revelation—of what? That, precisely, is the question.
• To be mistrusted by the stupid because he was so clever, to be envied by the inept because he had made good, to be loathed by the dull for his wit, by the boors for his breeding and by the unattractive for his success with women—what a tribute to his universal superiority!
• * “‘Damn’ braces, ‘bless’ relaxes.” There are many people for whom hate and rage pay a higher dividend of immediate satisfaction than love. Congenitally aggressive, they soon become adrenaline addicts, deliberately indulging their ugliest passions for the sake of the ‘kick’ they derive from their psychically stimulated endocrines... they sedulously cultivate their truculence... Adrenaline addiction is rationalized as Righteous Indignation
• The Good Fairy, who visits the cradles of the privileged, is often the Bad Fairy in a luminous disguise. She comes loaded with presents; but her bounty, all too often, is fatal. To Urbain Grandier, for example, the Good Fairy had brought, along with solid talents, the most dazzling of all gifts, and the most dangerous—eloquence.
• * When an orator, by the mere magic of words and a golden voice, persuades his audience of the rightness of a bad cause, we are very properly shocked. We ought to feel the same dismay whenever we find the same irrelevant tricks being used to persuade people of the rightness of a good cause... guilty of pandering to the least creditable elements in human nature. By exercising their disastrous gift of the gab, they deepen the quasi-hypnotic trance in which most human beings live and from which it is the aim and purpose of all true philosophy, all genuinely spiritual religion to deliver them. Moreover, there cannot be effective oratory without over-simplification. But you cannot over-simplify without distorting the facts. Even when he is doing his best to tell the truth, the successful orator is ipso facto a liar.
• the aggressive patriotism of caste and school and order. To the feud between the Jesuits and the Sorbonne was soon added the feud between the Jansenists and an alliance of Jesuits and Salesians. And after that came the long-drawn battle over Quietism and Disinterested Love. In the end the Gallican Church’s quarrels, internal and external, were settled, not by love or persuasion, but by authoritarian ukase.
• * Loyalty to their group transforms these pleasant vices into acts of heroism. Partisans are aware of themselves, not as sinners or criminals, but as altruists and idealists. And with certain qualifications this is in fact what they are. The only trouble is that their altruism is merely egotism at one remove, and that the ideal, for which they are ready in many cases to lay down their lives, is nothing but the rationalization of corporate interests and party passions.
• There are fashions in saints, just as there are fashions in medical treatment and women’s hats.
• It was a long and splendid oration in the manner (not yet old-fashioned, for the first edition of Balzac’s stylistically revolutionary letters did not appear until the following year) of the ‘devout humanists.’... The periods rumbled with an artificial thunder. For those who liked this sort of thing—and in 1623 who did not?
• With all the gravity of doctors of the Sorbonne, they held forth on the virtues of antimony and blood-letting, on the value of soap in clysters and the cautery in the treatment of gunshot wounds.
• But, except in sermons and in heaven, all lilies fester sooner or later into rottenness; the ewe-lamb is predestined, first to the indefatigably lustful ram, then to the butcher; and in hell the damned walk on a living pavement, tessellated with the tiny carcases of unbaptized babies. Since the Fall, total innocence has been identical, for all practical purposes, with total depravity. Every young girl is potentially the most knowing of widows and, thanks to Original Sin, every potential impurity is already, even in the most innocent, more than half actualized. To help it to complete actualization, to watch the still virginal bud unfold into the rank and blowsy flower—this would be a pleasure not only of the senses
• In the aristocratic world of a few years later, “women,” according to Bussy-Rabutin, “gained as much esteem for men as arms.” The conquest of a celebrated beauty was equivalent, very nearly, to the conquest of a province... In the fashionable slang of the time, one ‘embarked’ on one of these glorious affairs, embarked deliberately and self-consciously for the express purpose of cutting a more considerable figure in the world. Sex can be used either for self-affirmation or for self-transcendence
• * On all the levels of our being, from the muscular and sensational to the moral and the intellectual, every tendency generates its own opposite. We look at something red, and visual induction intensifies our perception of green.. The same principle holds good on the higher levels of consciousness. Every yes begets a corresponding no. “There is more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in all the creeds.”
• Philippe was exceedingly attractive and “the strongest oaths are straw to the fire in the blood.” But as well as fire in the blood there is induction in the brain. Trincant was the parson’s best friend. The very act of recognizing that such a thing would be monstrous created in Grandier’s mind a perverse desire to betray him.
• If only matters could go on like this for ever! But it was like asking (just because the end of a madrigal is so beautiful, just because the evening light turns everything it touches into something else, something incomparably lovelier) it was like asking for a lifetime of summer sunsets, for dying falls in perpetuity.
• * And now it was all plain sailing—just a matter of carefully graduated words and gestures, of a tenderness modulating by insensible degrees from the professionally Christian to the Petrarchian, and from the Petrarchian to the all too human and the self-transcendently animal.
• And there she was, pinned helplessly between physiology and the social order—pregnant but unmarried, dishonoured beyond redemption.
• From having been the parson’s staunchest friend Trincant became, overnight, the most implacable and the most dangerous of his enemies. Grandier had forged another and an essential link in the chain that was to draw him to his doom.
• * For minds trained in the law, legal truth is the same thing as truth without qualification. To everyone else, as the Public Prosecutor discovered to his chagrin, the equivalence seems very far from evident.
• there had been revolutionary changes. But there was at least one institution that remained, at the end of this period, exactly what it had been at the beginning—the drug-store. In the apothecary’s shop described by Romeo, a tortoise hung, / An alligator stuff’d, and other skins
• * This temple of science, which is at the same time a magician’s laboratory and a side-show at a country fair, is a most expressive symbol of that strange agglomeration of incongruities, the seventeenth-century mind. For the age of Descartes and Newton was also the age of Fludd and Sir Kenelm Digby; the age of logarithms and analytical geometry was no less the age of the weapon salve, the Sympathetic Powder, the theory of Signatures.
• Nobody likes to think of himself as immoral and heretical; but at the same time nobody likes to renounce a course of action dictated by powerful impulses, especially when these impulses are recognized as being in their nature good, as tending towards a higher and more abundant life. Hence all the curious literature of rationalization and justification
• And after a flowery paragraph about Lazarus, he concludes with the plea that, since the end of punishment is amendment of life and since, after two weeks in prison, his own life has been amended, he should forthwith be released. <> It is always hard to believe that frank and unaffected emotion can find expression in the curious devices of a laboured style. But literature is not the same as life. Art is governed by one set of rules, conduct by another. The early seventeenth-century absurdity of Grandier’s epistolary manner is perfectly compatible with a real sincerity of feeling.
• * M. de la Rochepozay could yet do nothing to prevent this intolerable affront to his pride. Canon law—could anything be more subversive?—conceded that worms had rights and even permitted them, in certain circumstances, to turn.
• In the intervals of love the young Bishop occupied himself chiefly with war, first on land as Quartermaster General and Intendant of Artillery, and later at sea, as a captain of ships and as First Lord of the Admiralty. In this last capacity he virtually created the French Navy.
• * All this time the great nationalistic revolution, initiated by Cardinal Richelieu, had been making steady progress and now, almost suddenly, it began to affect the private life of every personage involved in this petty provincial drama. To break the power of the Protestants and the feudal magnates, Richelieu had persuaded the King and Council to order the demolition of every fortress in the realm.
• ‘The world’ is man’s experience as it appears to, and is moulded by, his ego. It is that less abundant life, which is lived according to the dictates of the insulated self. It is nature denatured by the distorting spectacles of our appetites and revulsions. It is the finite divorced from the Eternal... It is time apprehended as one damned thing after another.
• (“The desire for fame is ) the last infirmity of the noble mind.”
• Any man or woman, the most happy (by the world’s standards) no less than the most wretched, may come, suddenly or gradually, to what the author of The Cloud of Unknowing calls “the naked knowing and feeling of thine own being.” This immediate awareness of selfhood begets an agonizing desire to go beyond the insulated ego. “I am gall,” writes Hopkins, / “I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree /Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me; ... As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.”
• The primordial Fact that That art thou is a fact of individual consciousness. For the purposes of religion, this fact of consciousness has to be externalized and objectified by the projection of an infinite deity, standing apart from the finite. At the same time the primordial Duty of getting out of the way, so that the Ground can come to the surface of the finite consciousness, is projected outwards as the duty to win salvation within the framework of the Faith.
• In cases where union with the Son is pursued too exclusively—where attention is centered upon the humanity of the historical mediator—religion tends to become an affair, outwardly, of ‘works’ and inwardly of imaginings, visions and self-induced emotions. But in themselves neither works, nor visions, nor emotions directed towards a remembered or imagined person, are enough. Their value, so far as liberation and enlightenment are concerned, is purely instrumental. They are means to selflessness (or to be more precise, they may be means to selflessness)
• * The Provincial Letters take rank among the most consummate masterpieces of literary art. What precision, what verbal elegance, what a pregnant lucidity! And what delicate sarcasm, what an urbane ferocity! The pleasure we derive from Pascal’s performance is apt to blind us to the fact that, in the squabble between Jesuits and Jansenists, our incomparable virtuoso was fighting for what, in the main, was the worse cause... Committed to the Jansenist doctrine of predestined damnation for almost everyone and to the Jansenist ethic of unbending puritanism, the Church might easily have become an instrument of almost unmitigated evil... In doctrine, the extravagances of Jansenist Augustinianism were tempered by a dose of semi-Pelagian common sense.
• Contemplation, he insists, was never officially condemned and individual contemplatives continued, even in the worst days of the anti-Quietist movement, to flourish within the Society... Did the practice of contemplation produce better Jesuits than the practice of discursive meditation, or did it not?
• In this place our themes are the processes of mortification and the ‘natural man,’ who has to be mortified. The corollary of “Thy kingdom come” is “our kingdom go.” On that matter all are agreed. But all are not agreed as to the best way of making our kingdom go. Should it be conquered by force of arms? Or should it be converted?
• ** And yet Christ told His followers to consider the lilies—and to consider them, be it noted, in an almost Taoist spirit, not as emblems of something all too human, but as blessedly other, as autonomous creatures living according to the law of their own being and in union (perfect except for its unconsciousness) with the Order of Things. The author of Proverbs bids the sluggard consider the ways of the prudent ant. But Christ delights in the lilies precisely because they are not prudent, because they neither toil nor spin and yet are incomparably lovelier than the most gorgeous of Hebrew kings. Like Walt Whitman’s ‘Animals’... But the lilies of the field enjoy a glory which has this in common with the Order of the Garter—that “there’s no damned merit about it.” That, precisely, is their point;
• French literature of the seventeenth century is astonishingly poor in expressions of any but a strictly utilitarian or symbolic interest in birds, flowers, animals, landscape.
• * In practically any comedy or tragedy of Shakespeare one cannot read twenty lines without being made aware that, behind the clowns, the criminals, the heroes, behind the flirts and the weeping queens, beyond all that is agonizingly or farcically human, and yet symbiotic with man, immanent in his consciousness and consubstantial with his being, there lie the everlasting data, the given facts of planetary and cosmic existence on every level, animate and inanimate, mindless and purposively conscious. A poetry that represents man in isolation from nature, represents him inadequately. And analogously a spirituality which seeks to know God only within human souls, and not at the same time in the non-human universe with which in fact we are indissolubly related, is a spirituality which cannot know the fullness of divine being.
• How does it actually feel to be “possessed and governed by the Holy Spirit”? This state of conscious and continuous inspiration was described, with the most delicate precision of self-analysis, by Surin’s younger contemporary, Armelle Nicolas, affectionately known throughout her native Brittany as la bonne Armelle. This uneducated servant girl, who lived the life of a contemplative saint while cooking the dinner, scrubbing floors,.. “Losing sight of herself and all the workings of her mind, Armelle no longer envisaged herself as acting in anything, but as suffering and passively submitting to the workings which God accomplished in and by her;
• we are also born with Original Virtue—with a capacity for grace, in the language of Western theology, with a “spark,” a “fine point of the soul,” a fragment of unfallen consciousness, surviving from the state of primal innocence and technically known as the synteresis. Freudian psychologists pay far more attention to Original Sin than to Original Virtue.
• Father Surin, in his Letters, speaks of the ornaments in plaited straw upon which many good sisters of his acquaintance spent the greater part of their spare time. Their masterpiece, in this line, was a miniature straw coach, drawn by six straw horses, and destined to adorn the dressing-table of an aristocratic patroness.
• Perceiving that Flaubert’s heroine embodied a very widespread human tendency,.. Bovarism is by no means invariably disastrous. On the contrary, the process of imagining that we are what we are not, and of acting upon this imagination, is one of the most effective mechanisms of education. The title of the most enduring of all books of Christian devotion—The Imitation of Christ—bears eloquent witness to this fact.
• * In mediaeval and early modern Christendom the situation of sorcerers and their clients was almost precisely analogous to that of Jews under Hitler, capitalists under Stalin, Communists and fellow travellers in the United States. They were regarded as the agents of a Foreign Power, unpatriotic at the best, and, at the worst, traitors, heretics, enemies of the people.
• * In order to justify their behaviour, they turn their theories into dogmas, their by-laws into First Principles, their political bosses into Gods and all those who disagree with them into incarnate devils. This idolatrous transformation of the relative into the Absolute and the all too human into the Divine, makes it possible for them to indulge their ugliest passions with a clear conscience and in the certainty that they are working for the Highest Good. And when the current beliefs come, in their turn, to look silly, a new set will be invented, so that the immemorial madness may continue to wear its customary mask of legality, idealism and true religion.
• These pictures of rustic communities solidly based on superstition, fear and mutual malice are curiously depressing—all the more so because they are so modern, so topical and up-to-date. They remind us all too forcibly of certain pages in La Vingt-Cinquième Heure and 1984
• Montaigne: When he thought of witches, he found himself considering, not their punishable malice, but their perhaps not incurable malady. “In all conscience,” he writes, “I should rather have prescribed them hellebore” (a drug supposed to be effective in purging melancholy and therefore in curing madness) “than hemlock.”
• * That all the exorcists believed in Grandier’s guilt and the genuineness of the possession seems certain. They believed even when, like Mignon, they had helped to fake the evidence which sent Grandier to the stake. (The history of spiritualism makes it very clear that fraud, especially pious fraud, is perfectly compatible with faith.)
• “M. Mignon is already saying that M. Barré is a saint, and they are reciprocally canonizing one another without waiting for the judgment of their superiors.” Barré corrects the devil when he goes astray in the labyrinth of grammar, and challenges unbelievers “to do as he does and put a finger in the demoniac’s mouth.” Father Rousseau, a Cordelier, was caught and bitten so hard that he was constrained to pull the nun’s nose with his other hand, to make her let go, crying, “Au diable, au diable!” much louder than our kitchen-maids cry, “Au chat, au chat!” when puss has run off with something.
• now suppose that it could be proved, out of the mouths of the good sisters, that these gentlemen of the so-called Reformed Religion had been in secret league with an enemy even worse than the English—with the devil himself? In that case there would be ample justification for doing what he had long been planning to do: namely, to deprive Loudun of all its rights and privileges, and to transfer them to his own brand-new city of Richelieu. And even this was not all. The devils might be useful in yet other ways. If people could be made to believe that Loudun was but the beachhead of a regular invasion from hell, then it might be possible to revive the Inquisition in France. And how convenient that would be!... As we know from our own experience of such secular devils as the Jews, the Communists, the Bourgeois Imperialists, the best way to establish and justify a police state is to keep harping on the dangers of a Fifth Column.
• With the eclipse of the Carmelites’ miracle-working Notre-Dame de Recouvrance, Loudun had lost almost the whole of its tourist trade. Now, thanks to the devils, all and more than all was restored.
• What was the theory of human nature, in terms of which Grandier’s contemporaries interpreted ordinary behaviour and such strange happenings as those which took place at Loudun?: ... in the words of Robert Burton, whose chapters on the anatomy of the Soul... In the etymological sense of the word, it is a psychological atom—something which cannot be cut up. But this simple and indivisible soul of man has a three-fold manifestation. It is in some sort a trinity in unity, comprising a vegetal, a sensitive and a rational soul.
• the Battle of Antimony had been raging for three generations... there was no further need for spending money on cathartics. Dr. Patin might fulminate and the Parlement forbid; but for the costive French bourgeois the appeal of antimony was irresistible. Perpetual Pills were treated as heirlooms and after passing through one generation were passed on to the next.)
• The same kind of false analogy between the arts of the metal-worker and the alchemist on the one hand and the arts of the doctor and dietician on the other led to the belief that the value of foods increased with their increasing refinement—that white bread was better than brown, that a much-stewed bouillon was superior to the unconcentrated meats and vegetables of which it was composed. It was assumed that ‘coarse’ foods coarsened the people who ate them.
• while belief in diabolic possession sharply declined during the nineteenth century, belief in possession by departed spirits became, during the same period, much more common.
• Those who crusade, not for God in themselves, but against the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better, but leave it either as it was, or sometimes even perceptibly worse than it was, before the crusade began. By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself. <> Though frequently Manichaean in practice, Christianity was never Manichaean in its dogmas. In this respect it differs from our modern idolatries of Communism and Nationalism, which are Manichaean not only in action, but also in creed and theory. Today it is everywhere self-evident that we are on the side of Light, they on the side of Darkness.
• For us, these ESP and PK phenomena prove only that the old notion of a completely watertight soul is untenable. Below and beyond the conscious self lie vast ranges of subconscious activity
• Sister Jane and her fellow nuns had had religion and chastity drummed into them from childhood. By induction, these lessons had called into existence, within the brain and its associated mind, a psycho-physical centre, from which there emanated contradictory lessons in irreligion and obscenity. (Every collection of spiritual letters abounds in references to those frightful temptations against the faith and against chastity
• In the present case the mistaken belief in possession was due to the third of these causes. Like the mercurial and antimonial poisonings of earlier days, like the sulpha poisoning and serum-fevers of the present, the Loudun epidemic was an “iatrogenic disease,” produced and fostered by the very physicians who were supposed to be restoring the patients to health. The guilt of the exorcists seems the more enormous when we remember that their proceedings were in direct violation of the rules laid down by the Church.
• One, the Mother Superior, stretched her legs to such an extraordinary extent that, from toe to toe, the distance was seven feet, though she herself was but four feet high.” Reading such accounts of the nuns’ performances, one is forced to the conclusion that, as well as naturaliter Christiana, the feminine soul is naturaliter Drum-Majoretta.
• * When public executions were abolished, it was not because the majority desired their abolition; it was because a small minority of exceptionally sensitive reformers possessed sufficient influence to have them banned. In one of its aspects, civilization may be defined as a systematic withholding from individuals of certain occasions for barbarous behaviour.
• That face, which so many women had found so irresistibly handsome, was now the mask, grotesquely bald, of the clown in a harlequinade. <> “Good,” said the Commissioner, “good! And now the fingernails.”
• Instead of which, the scoundrel was talking like a good Catholic and giving the most touching, the most heart-rending example of Christian resignation. The thing was insufferable. And what would His Eminence say, when he heard that the only result of this carefully stage-managed ceremony had been to convince the spectators that the parson was innocent? There was only one thing to do, and Laubardemont, who was a man of decision, promptly did it. <> “Clear the court,” he ordered.
• According to Father Tranquille, Laubardemont actually wept while he was making this final appeal for a confession. We need not doubt the friar’s word. Richelieu’s hangman possessed a genuine gift of tears... Grandier persisted in his refusal to sign a false confession. To Lactance and Tranquille, the fact was further, final proof of guilt. It was Lucifer who had closed the prisoner’s mouth and hardened his heart against repentance. <> Laubardemont turned off his tears.
• It is a matter of observable fact that men and women are not the mere creatures of Society. But official theory proclaims that they are. Therefore it becomes necessary to depersonalize the ‘enemies of Society’ in order to transform the official lie into truth. For those who know the trick, this reduction of the human to the subhuman, of the free individual to the obedient automation, is a relatively simple matter.
• Even the most important personage of all had the greatest difficulty in reaching the place appointed for him. It took the prisoner half an hour to cover the last hundred yards to the stake, and his guards were compelled to fight for every inch of the way.
• * odds and ends would be no less effective if the parson were guilty of the crimes imputed to him, than if he were innocent. The power to work miracles lies, not in the source of a relic, but in its reputation, however acquired. Constant throughout history, a certain percentage of human beings can be restored to health or happiness by practically anything that has been well advertised—from Lourdes to witchcraft, from the Ganges to patent medicines
• He liked to say that “the man who does not have excessive ideas in regard to God will never come near Him.” And of course it was true—provided always that the excessive ideas were of the right kind. Some of the young father’s excessive ideas, though orthodox enough, seemed to deviate from the high-road of discretion.
• No man can concentrate his attention upon evil, or even upon the idea of evil, and remain unaffected. To be more against the devil than for God is exceedingly dangerous. Every crusader is apt to go mad. He is haunted by the wickedness which he attributes to his enemies; it becomes in some sort a part of him.
• * In one of its aspects the culture of the seventeenth century, especially in France, was simply a prolonged effort, on the part of the ruling minority, to overstep the limitations of organic existence... men and women aspired to identify themselves with their social persona. They were not content merely to bear a great name; they longed to be it. Their ambition was actually to become the offices they held, the dignities they had acquired or inherited. Hence the elaboration of baroque ceremonial, hence those rigid and complex codes of precedence, of honour, of good manners.
• Andrew Marvell.
  Why should, of all things, man unrul’d
  Such unproportioned dwellings build?
  The beasts are by their dens express’d
  And birds contrive an equal nest;
  The low-roofed tortoises do dwell
  In cases fit of tortoise-shell:
  No creature loves an empty space;
  Their bodies measure out their place.
  But he, superfluously spread,
  Demands more room alive than dead,
  And in his hollow palace goes
  Where winds, as he, themselves may lose.
  What need of all this marble crust
  T’impark the wanton mote of dust?
• The authors of memoirs and the collectors of anecdotes abound in stories about belching in high places, about the breaking of wind in a royal presence, about the gamy aroma of kings, the bromidrosis of dukes and marshals. Henri IV’s feet and armpits enjoyed an international reputation. Bellegarde had a perpetually running nose, Bassompierre a set of toes which rivalled those of his royal master. The copiousness of these anecdotes and the delighted amusement, which the telling of them evidently evoked, were in direct proportion to the enormity of kingly and aristocratic pretensions.
• * Cardinal Richelieu comported himself as though he were a demi-god. But the wretched man had to play his part in a body which disease had rendered so repulsive that there were times when people could hardly bear to sit in the same room with him. He suffered from tubercular osteitis of his right arm and a fissure of the fundament, and was thus forced to live in the foetid atmosphere of his own suppuration.
• Between the rotting body of the actual man and the glory of the persona, the gulf was unbridgeable. In Jules de Gaultier’s phrase, “the Bovaric angle” separating fact from phantasy approximated to one hundred and eighty degrees.
• Fortunately, as her chemise had been pulled up over her head, the Prioress did not see herself naked. And when the two stinking personages pulled it down again and untied her, she “did not notice that anything occurred which was contrary to modesty.”
• œur Jeanne, it is evident, was still under the impression that the “inner life” is a life of constant self-analysis in public. But in fact, of course, the inner life begins where the analysable self leaves off. The soul that goes on talking about its states thereby prevents itself from knowing its divine Ground.
• WE participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look. The tragic author feels himself into his personages; and so, from the other side, does the reader or listener. But in pure comedy there is no identification between creator and literary creature, between spectator and spectacle... Pure comedy cannot be kept up for very long. That is why so many of the greatest comic writers have adopted the impure form, in which there is a constant transition from outwardness to inwardness, and back again.
• “Do not hunt after the truth,” advises one of the Zen masters, “only cease to cherish opinions.” And the Christian mystics say substantially the same thing—with this difference, however, that they have to make an exception in favour of the opinions known as dogmas, articles of faith, pious traditions and the like.
• To be mad with lucidity and in complete possession of one’s intellectual faculties—this, surely, must be one of the most terrible of experiences. Unimpaired, Surin’s reason looked on helplessly, while his imagination, his emotions and his autonomic nervous system comported themselves like an alliance of criminal maniacs, bent on his destruction.
• * language is the cause of man’s deviation from animal innocence and animal conformity to the nature of things into madness and diabolism. Words are at once indispensable and fatal. Treated as working hypotheses, propositions about the world are instruments, by means of which we are enabled progressively to understand the world. Treated as absolute truths, as dogmas to be swallowed, as idols to be worshipped, propositions about the world distort our vision of reality and lead us into all kinds of inappropriate behaviour.
• * The fundamental human problem is ecological: men must learn how to live with the cosmos on all its levels, from the material to the spiritual. As a race, we have to discover how a huge and rapidly increasing population can go on existing satisfactorily on a planet of limited size and possessed of resources, many of which are wasting assets that can never be renewed.
• * “I am told,” he writes two years before his death, “that there are pearl fishers, who have a pipe that goes from the sea floor to the surface, where it is buoyed up with corks, and that through this pipe they breathe—and are yet at the bottom of the sea. I do not know if this be true; but in any case it expresses very well what I have to say; for the soul has a pipe that goes to heaven, a channel, says St. Catherine of Genoa, that leads to the very heart of God. Through it she breathes wisdom and love, and is sustained. While the soul is here, fishing for pearls at the bottom of the earth, she speaks with other souls, she preaches, she does God’s business; and all the time there is a pipe that goes to heaven to draw down eternal life and consolation
• “I am told,” he writes two years before his death, “that there are pearl fishers, who have a pipe that goes from the sea floor to the surface, where it is buoyed up with corks, and that through this pipe they breathe—and are yet at the bottom of the sea. I do not know if this be true; but in any case it expresses very well what I have to say; for the soul has a pipe that goes to heaven, a channel, says St. Catherine of Genoa, that leads to the very heart of God. Through it she breathes wisdom and love, and is sustained. While the soul is here, fishing for pearls at the bottom of the earth, she speaks with other souls, she preaches, she does God’s business; and all the time there is a pipe that goes to heaven to draw down eternal life and consolation
• The professional moralists who inveigh against drunkenness are strangely silent about the equally disgusting vice of herd-intoxication—of down-ward self-transcendence into subhumanity by the process of getting together in a mob.
• The organs of the body politic are purposive groups. A crowd is the social equivalent of a cancer. The poison it secretes depersonalizes its constituent members to the point where they start to behave with a savage violence
• * Meanwhile, new and previously undreamed-of devices for exciting mobs have been invented. There is the radio, which has enormously extended the range of the demagogue’s raucous yelling... And finally there is that greatest of our social inventions, free, compulsory education. Everyone now knows how to read and everyone consequently is at the mercy of the propagandists, governmental or commercial,
• * The unwitting purpose of the men and women who succumb to these collective manias is the same as that pursued by the sectaries who use the dance as a religious rite—namely, to escape from insulated selfhood into a state in which there are no responsibilities, no guilt-laden past or haunting future, but only the present, blissful consciousness of being someone else. <> Intimately associated with the ecstasy-producing rite of rhythmic movement is the ecstasy-producing rite of rhythmic sound... No man, however highly civilized, can listen for very long to African drumming, or Indian chanting, or Welsh hymn-singing, and retain intact his critical and self-conscious personality.
• In the West the nearest equivalent to these Tantric practices was the sexual discipline devised by John Humphrey Noyes and practised by the members of the Oneida Community. At Oneida elementary sexuality was not only successfully civilized; it was made compatible with, and subordinate to, a form of Protestant Christianity, sincerely preached and earnestly acted upon.

__ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Bashkirtseff

Robert Jackson Bennett's earlier work is more ambitious in its world building than "The Tainted Cup", which necessitated some slightly clumsy exposition passages. The central character is smart and strong but leaves me a bit cold.

• (Though can we really call ourselves occupiers, thinks Mulaghesh, if we’ve been here for nearly seventy-five years? When do we graduate to residents?)
• * In fact, Mulaghesh believes she has acquitted only three people in her two decades as polis governor. And we convict almost every case, she thinks, because the law requires us to prosecute them for living their way of life...
• “But … But this isn’t fair!” says Yaroslav. “Why do you get to bandy about our sigils, our holy signs, but we can’t?”
  “The polis governor’s quarters”—Jindash waves a hand at the walls—“are technically Saypuri soil. We are not under the jurisdiction of the Worldly Regulations, which apply only to the Continent.”
• Mulaghesh is sensitive to the fact that, in the full scope of history, Saypur’s global hegemony is minutes old. For many hundreds of years before the Great War, Saypur was the Continent’s colony—established and enforced, naturally, by the Continent’s Divinities—and few have forgotten this in Bulikov
• so far it has mostly consisted of waiting. As an assistant to the associate ambassadorial administrator, Pitry has learned how to wait on new and unexciting things in new and unexciting ways, becoming an expert at watching the second hand of a clock slowly crank out the hours. The purpose of an assistant, he has decided, is to have someone upon whom you can unload all the deadly little nothings that fill the bureaucratic day.
• * The woman smiles. The smile is neither pleasant nor unpleasant: it is a smile like fine silver plate, used for one occasion and polished and put away once finished.
• “Well … Hm.” He smears on his nicest smile.
• Shara often does illegal things in her trade. But it’s one thing to violate a country’s law when you’re actively working against that country, and it’s another to do what Shara is doing right now, which is so horrendously dreaded in Saypur and so fervently outlawed and regulated and monitored on the Continent, the birthplace of this particular act.
  Because right now, in CD Troonyi’s office, Shara is about to perform a miracle.
  As always, the change is quite imperceptible: there is a shift in the air, a coolness on the skin, as if someone has cracked a door somewhere; as she writes, the tip of her finger begins to feel that the glass’s surface is softer and softer, until it is like she is writing on water.
• But Auntie Vinya’s allure, Shara feels, has always gone beyond her beauty: it is something in her eyes, which are both wide and widely set, and deep brown. It is like Auntie Vinya is always half remembering a long life most people would have killed to lead.
• * And though Vinya may be her aunt, there never was a relationship between a commander and their operative that wasn’t somewhat adversarial.
• And as Shara and any other student of the history before the Great War knows, the Continent was practically swimming in such things. Before the Kaj invaded, the daily life of people on the Continent was propelled, maintained, and supported by countless miraculous items: teapots that never went empty, locks that responded only to a drop of a certain person’s blood,
• But she remembers how Efrem lay on the cot in the embassy vault, his skull wearing the crude mask of his small, delicate face.…
• And she’d answered: What I think you truly want, my dear child, is a prince. But you can’t have such a thing at home, can you? They’d kill you for that. And the cocksure grin had melted off his face, his blue eyes crackling with brittleness like ice dunked in warm water, and she’d known then that she’d hurt him, really, genuinely hurt him, found someplace deep inside him no one knew about and burned it into ash.
• But Sigrud knows that crowds are much like individual people: they have their own psychology, their own habits, their own natures. They unthinkingly assume specific structures—channels and corridors of traffic, bends around blockades—and break apart these structures in a manner that almost seems choreographed when you watch it. It’s simply a matter of placing yourself within these structures, like hovering in the still side of a school of fish as it twists and darts across the ocean floor. Crowds, like people, never truly know themselves.
• The man plunges ahead into a part of Bulikov that was obviously much more ravaged by the Blink, the War, and whichever other catastrophes happened to get wedged within that rocky period of world history. The number of staircases practically triples, or quadruples—it’s a little hard for Sigrud’s eye to count them. Spiral staircases rise up to halt completely in midair, some only ten feet off the ground, some twenty or thirty. There is something faintly osseous about them, resembling the rippled horns of some massive, exotic ruminant.
• It was to be a four-hour slugfest: a game of endless beginnings, of defensive positions, of recombinations and rearrangements. It was, one teacher said, the most conservative game of Batlan he had ever seen played: but, of course, they were not really playing Batlan at all, but a different game altogether, a mix of Batlan and Tovos Va they were inventing as they fought.
• “Perhaps so. Perhaps I’ve traveled solely to find backtalk somewhere. But I wonder—what could have beaten you so badly that it’s honed such a sharp edge, my little battle-ax?” He swooped back around, redoubled his defenses. (Some student nearby grumbled, “When are they actually going to start playing?”) <> “You are mistaken, sir,” said Shara. “You are merely sensitive. In fact, I would expect that to sit upon an uncushioned chair would surely score your princely buttocks.”
• Names, she thinks. Names are always such a problem. After all, the South Seas are actually northeast of Saypur—they’re only called such because it was the Continent that named them first, and any name, as Saypur has learned over and over again, dies hard and slowly.
• They started meeting in the library nearly every day, and their relationship felt like a continuation of their Batlan game: a long, exhausting conflict in which little ground was ever ceded or gained. Shara was aware throughout that they were playing reversed roles, considering their nationalities: for she was the staunch, mistrustful conservative, zealously advocating the proper way of living and building a disciplined, useful life; and he was the permissive libertine, arguing that if someone wished to do something, and if it hurt no one, and moreover if they had the money to pay for it, then why should anyone interfere?
• Vohannes laughed. “My dear Shara, do you not see that what makes your country so great is that it allows its people to be human in a way the Continent never did?”
• We do not protest because we have no voice to protest with. To have a voice is a crime.
  We cannot think to protest. To think these things is a crime. These words—these words you hear—they are stolen from myself.
  We are not chosen. We are not the children of the gods. We are the soulless, we are ash-children, we are as mud and dirt.
• He recalls a saying from his homeland: Envy the fire, for it is either going or not. Fires do not feel happy, sad, angry. They burn, or they do not burn.
• “And the Restorationists hate you for it.” “Like I said, they’re fighting history. And everyone loses that fight.”
• I’d not weep to see you sic your dogs on him. The man is a reeking bag of goat shit with a beard.”
• And it’s not a speech, Shara! I have tried to involve Saypur and her trading partners before, but Saypur does not lend us its favor—it wants to keep things the way they are, with Saypur completely in control of everything. It doesn’t want to see wealth in Bulikov any more than it wants us chanting the rites of the Divinities. If I must nakedly prostitute myself to bring aid to my city, to my country, I will gladly do so.” <> He hasn’t changed any at all, really, she thinks, torn between amusement and shock. He’s still the noble idealist, in his own perverse way.…
• she privately dreads this: one’s own security often makes it hard to penetrate that of one’s opponents.
• In Shara’s estimation, lists form one half of the heart of intelligence, the second half being patience. Most espionage work, after all, is a matter of collecting data and categorizing it:
• * “And this means we shed our morals at the door?” “Nations have no morals,” says Shara, quoting her aunt from memory. “Only interests.”
• He opens his mouth to scream again. Shara watches as flames flood into his mouth, down his throat. She can see his tongue bubbling.
• * Saypur, however, being a colony that only peripherally benefited from miraculous intervention, had better knowledge of nonmiraculous sanitation. They quarantined the infected, and when soldiers arrived home, they promptly quarantined them as well—a decision that caused much outrage in Saypur at the time. Overall, though the Plague Years were far from easy, Saypur lost less than ten thousand lives to the sudden, massive influx of disease... It is this self-sufficiency that also came to Saypur’s aid in terms of technology... Having been forced to generate such technological innovation under threat, and now suddenly finding itself sitting upon a wealth of resources that could now be called its own, Saypur underwent a phenomenal technological transformation overnight.
• One of the Continent’s biggest problems with having six Divinities were the many, many conflicting mythologies: for example, how could the world be a burning, golden coal pulled from the fires of Olvos’s own heart while also being a stone hacked by Kolkan from a mountain behind the setting sun? And how could one’s soul, after death, flit away to join Jukov’s flock of brown starlings, while also flowing down the river of death to wash ashore in Ahanas’s garden, where it would grow into an orchid? All Divinities were very clear about such things, but none of them agreed with one another.
• The final piece of evidence supporting this theory was the “reality static” that appeared directly after the Kaj successfully killed four of the six original Divinities: the world apparently “remembered” that parts of it once existed in different realities, and had trouble reassembling itself. Saypuri soldiers recorded seeing rivers that flowed into the sky, silver that would turn to lead if you carried it through a certain place, trees that would bloom and die several times over in one day,
• She knows she should discount her own paranoia, of course—Paranoia of one’s case officers and commanders, as she’s told her own sources, is a perfectly natural feeling 
• after all, your most preferred method of dead drops. You tend to like the finance people. They are so process-oriented, not unlike yourself.”
• “I don’t have the time or the energy to hate,” says Shara. “I only wish to understand. People are what they are.” She smiles weakly and shrugs: What can one do?
• Shara salts the goat meat, then tosses it in with the simmering vegetables. “Yes. The Plague Years came just after, the last bit of Divine protection falling away, so we know for sure that he is gone from this world.” <> Mulaghesh thinks. “It feels damn odd,” she says, “to list Divinities as you would suspects for a robbery. As if we could go out and line them up on a wall and have the victim come in and point the criminal out.
• Shara coughs. “You get the idea,” she says. “These punishments were carried out with almost no objection. The people did not fight. They welcomed these punishments with the sober obsequiousness of the condemned. <> “Over time, Kolkan’s punishments and rules became more and more severe, and odder and odder. He became fixated on flesh and desire, on sexuality and lust. He wished to wholly censor these subjects. His first method of repression may be ironically resonant to any Saypuri. For he banned any public acknowledgment of the female sex or anatomy. Much like how some of our own laws censor discussion.”
• I have never met a person who possessed a privilege who did not exercise that privilege to the fullest extent that they possibly could. Say what you like of a belief, of a party, of a finance system, of a power—all I see is privilege and its consequences. <> States are not, in my opinion, composed of structures supporting privilege. Rather, they are composed of structures denying it—in other words, deciding who is not invited to the table.
• “Come work for me. It’d be a change of pace. We’re not the old guard. None of my companies are. We’re doing big new things. And also I can pay you perfectly despicable amounts of money.”
• * “I’m sad to see you so happy to persecute Kolkashtanis.”
  He laughs blackly. “Don’t they deserve it? I mean, my own damn family … You want to talk about persecution, why don’t you talk to the people who did so with zeal for hundreds of years, even without their damn”—he glances around, lowers his voice—“god?”
  “Aren’t they still your people, the very ones you want to help? Do you really want to reform Bulikov, Vo, or burn it to the ground?”
• Perhaps he’s an obstacle to the future of the Continent—for I don’t see him ever wishing to see a bright new future, but rather the dead, dull, dusty past.
• Her first trick is an old and simple one: she takes out a jar, fills it with daisy petals—Sacred to Ahanas, thinks Shara, for their willful recurrence—shakes the jar, and dumps out the petals. Then she takes a bit of graveyard mud, smears it across the glass bottom of the jar, wipes it clean, and applies the mouth of the jar to her eye, like a telescope.
• * And I think by exposing him, you wished to impress me, impress us all. But you must know that if corruption is powerful enough, it’s not corruption at all—it’s law. Unspoken, unwritten, but law. Such was the case here.
• Your job in the Ministry is not to stop corruption and inequality: rather, these are tools in your bag to be used to aid Saypur in every way possible. Your job is to make sure the past never happens again, that we never see such poverty and powerlessness again. Corruption and inequality are useful things: if they benefit us, we must own them fully... Shara thought of Vohannes then: You paint your world in such drab cynicisms.…
• Very arbitrary amounts, too—within one thousand five hundred pounds and one thousand nine hundred pounds every time. We’re not sure wh—”
  Shara sits forward. “It’s the weight check.”
  “What?”
  “The weight check! The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has automatic background checks on purchasers of large quantities of materials! Oil, wood, stone, metal … We want to know who we’re selling to, if they buy large enough amounts. And for steel, the weight check amount must be—”
  “Two thousand pounds,”
• No Divine workings at all, leaving only the Blink as a possible cause. It is worth noting, though, that no one has ever been able to adequately study the Blink. The Continent protects its damages like a bitter old woman does grudges.
• Yet its head is by far the worst part: the back is roughly like the head of a balding man, sporting a ring of long, gray scraggly hair around its skull; but instead of a face or jaw, the head stretches forward to form what looks like a wide, long, flat bill—like, again, that of a goose, though it has no eyes. Yet rather than the tough keratin normally seen in ducks or geese, the bill is made of knuckled human flesh, as if a man’s fingers were fused together, and he brought both hands together to form a joint at the heel of his palms.
• “So the tower never shrank! The whole temple must have sunk into the mud! That shabby little clay shack up in the park was never the true Seat of the World! Which is what everyone, even everyone in Bulikov, still thinks. This is it! This is the Seat of the World! This is where the Divinities met!”
  As Shara has devoted most of her adult life to history, she can’t help but be overwhelmed with giddiness, as unpatriotic as it may be; but one unmoved part of her mind speaks up:
  This can’t all be coincidence. The most sacred structure in Bulikov just happened to sink so it remained hidden for nearly eighty years?
• “But this mural proves why it vanished! It corroborates the theory that Ahanas actually grew the city, sowing miraculous seeds that grew into living buildings, homes, streets, lights.… Peaches that glowed at night, like streetlights, vines that funneled in water and away waste … It’s fascinating.”... “But that was because they didn’t have to! Ahanas was able to meet every single one of their needs! They lived in complete harmony with this massive, organic city! But after the Blink, when disease started rampaging through the Continent, they must have refused every medicine, every ministration.… So nearly every Ahanashtani on the Continent must have died out!
• Shara tries praising the names of a few key Jukoshtani saints. The door is unmoved. This must be what it’s like, she thinks, to be a lecher trying out lines on a girl at a party.
• The dark air is filled with sighs and squeaks and low hums. The rattle of pennies, the scrape of wood. The air pressure in the room feels like it is constantly changing: either something in the Warehouse has confused Shara’s skin, inner ear, and sinuses, or there are countless forces applying themselves to her, then fading, like ocean currents. <> How many miracles are in here with us, Shara wonders, functioning away in the dark? How many of the words of the Divinities still echo in this place?
• “Well, despite all the Regulations, that thing under the ice is considered holy by most of the Continent,” says Shara. “It is, after all, a creature of stories and myths valued by your culture. It’s part of your heritage. If you wish us to kill it—to kill what is, in effect, a living legend—we would want to have your express permission to do so.”
  Nesrhev’s face sours. “You,” he says, “are trying to cover your ass.”
  “Perhaps. But Urav is an integral part to some of your treasured myths. We are not Continentals. To some Continentals, if we are successful in killing Urav, it would be tantamount to destroying a historic work of art.”
  “In this case, though,” says Mulaghesh, “it’s a work of art that’s running around killing people.”
• “Because it is all I know,” he says with a shrug. “And I am good at it. I could save lives tonight. And the only life risked would be my own.”
• The ice crackles underneath Sigrud’s feet. The world is a coward, he thinks. It does not change before your face; it waits until your back is turned, and pounces.…
  The voice says, “PAIN IS YOUR FUTURE. PAIN IS YOUR PURITY.” <> Sigrud says, “But you cannot teach me pain”—he begins to tug at the fingers of the glove—“because I already know it.”
• * She looks at it. “But that … that isn’t the blessing of Kolkan.…”
  “Maybe not. But I think that … being punished by Kolkan, and being blessed by him … They may be the same thing.”
  Shara remembers Efrem reading from Olvos’s Book of the Red Lotus and commenting aloud, The Divine did not understand themselves in the same way we do not understand ourselves, and their unintentional effects often say more about them than their intentional ones.
• *“Disaster is our constant companion in Bulikov, Ambassador,” says Vohannes. “Grief and decency are mere decorations that hang upon the real problem: Bulikov desperately needs help and reconstruction. Real reconstruction, which we cannot do ourselves!”
• He breathes heavily for a moment; she suspects he is weeping. “ ‘The world is our crucible,’ ” he murmurs. “ ‘And with each burn, we are shaped.’ ”
  Shara knows the line. “The Kolkashtava?”
  He laughs bitterly. “Maybe Volka was right. Once a Kolkashtani …”
  Then he is silent.
  Shara wonders what kind of man thinks of his brother when naked in a woman’s bed. Then they both find troubled sleep.
• Shara’s consciousness churns awake, kicking against the dark, oily waters of a hangover.
• Shara feels sick. There is nothing—nothing—that could ever be more terrifying to intelligence operatives than being installed in public office, exposed and vulnerable to all the pleas and restrictions they could previously simply sidestep in their shadow life.
• It seems unlikely that you would not know this already, & since the only indication of this deposit box’s existence is a message encoded in a mixture of old Gheshati, Chotokan, Dreyling, & Avranti, then the probabilities suggest that only a person with great experience in ancient translation would be able to find this box at all. <> I suppose what I am saying is—Hello, Shara.
• I have touched upon a truth in Bulikov perilous enough that I feel my life is in danger—but I am not certain which truth. Yet you are, in many ways, wiser & worldlier than I ever wished to be, & I hope that you may succeed where I have failed.
• * Then—“abruptly”—in 723, all six Divinities felt compelled to sit down in the Night of the Convening, in the future spot of Bulikov, hash out their differences, & form what was, more or less, a pantheon of equal Divinities.… Yet all religious texts I have reviewed indicate this was decided with no consultation with their mortal followers whatsoever! This was, reportedly, a “unilateral” decision among Divinities, as one would expect, for why would a god consult with his or her followers, like a politician among constituents? Yet obviously the shift had been brewing for years, among their mortal flock!
• * “Forgetting.” she said, “is a beautiful thing. When you forget, you remake yourself. The Continent must forget. It is trying not to—but it must. For a caterpillar to become a butterfly, it must forget it was ever a caterpillar at all. Then it will be as if the caterpillar never was, & there was only ever the butterfly.”
• The pattern is undeniable: the Continentals made their decisions, formed their attitudes … & the Divinities followed, making them official.
  Who was leading whom? Is this evidence of some kind of unconscious vote, which the Divinities then enacted?
  I wonder, sometimes, if the Continentals were like schools offish, & the slightest flick of one fish caused dozens of others to follow suit, until the entire shimmering cloud had changed course.
  And were the Divinities the sum of this cloud? An embodiment, perhaps, of a national subconscious? Or were they empowered by the thoughts & praises by millions of people, yet also yoked to every one of those thoughts—giant, terrible puppets forced to dance by the strings of millions of puppeteers?...
  But were they merely hearing the echoes of their own voices, magnified through strange caverns & tunnels? When they spoke to the Divinities, were they speaking to giant reflections of themselves?
• She lives on a diet of agendas, each stuffed in her hand as she walks through the door, and a parade of bland and vapid names: “Today is the Legislative Co-Action Association of the Kivrey Quarters”
• *Sigrud: “Life is full of beautiful dangers, dangerous beauties,” says Sigrud. He stares into the sky, and the white sunlight glints off of his many scars. “They wound us in ways we cannot see: an injury ripples out, like a stone dropped in water, touching moments years into the future.”.. “We think we move, we run, we push forward, but, I think, in many ways we are still running in place, trapped in a moment that happened to us long ago.”
• Yet she feels she is drowning in information: Efrem’s journal, the lists from the Warehouse, financial transactions, Continental history, forbidden lists, Votrov subsidiaries, possessors of loomworks—all of it dances before her eyes until she cannot hold a single thought besides,
• Just imagine, she tells herself. Behind this crumbling city is a hidden, mythic paradise, and one only has to scrape at reality with one’s fingernail to find it.
• A carpet, with every thread blessed.
  A loomworks that could take the carpet apart with great ease.
  And a small armada of steel ships in the hills, with no ocean.
  The boy in the police cell, whispering, We can’t fly through the air on ships of wood.
  Perhaps they wouldn’t need the ocean at all.
• He is so much like Vohannes, in so many ways: many of his gestures and much of his bearing are Vo’s. Yet there is something strangely more decayed and yet delicate about this man: something in the way he cocks his hips, the way he crosses his arms.… She remembers the mhovost, and its effeminate walk back and forth, mimicking someone she hadn’t yet glimpsed.
• And when I was down there, in the Seat of the World, I looked for the famous stained glass I have always heard of … but all the windows were broken. All except one, in the Kolkashtani atrium. And I thought it was so curious, at the time, that it was whole, unbroken, yet blank.” <> She opens her eyes. “That’s where the other gods jailed him, didn’t they? That’s where Kolkan has been imprisoned for the past three hundred years. A living god, chained within a pane of glass.”


• * Captain Mivsk Ashkovsky of the good ship Mornvieva stares through the green lenses of his goggles and into the wild riot of the dawn. Clouds cling to the horizon like newspaper headlines.
• Another bell tolls. And another. And another. They all have different tones, as if some are very large and others are very small, but more than that, each bell has a resonance that seems like it can only be perceived by different parts of the mind, pouring in alien experiences: when one bell tolls, she imagines she sees hot, murky swamps, tangles of vines, and clutches of flowering orchids; when another bell tolls, she smells flaming pitch, and sawdust, and mortar; .. One bell for each Divinity, thinks Shara. I don’t know how he did it, or even what he’s doing, but Volka’s found a way to ring all the bells of the Seat of the World.
• “YOU ARE UNWORTHY.”
  Volka is mute with shock.
  The voice says, “YOU HAVE BATHED FRUITS IN THE WATERS OF THE OCEAN. YOU HAVE MIXED LINENS AND COTTONS WITH YOUR GARMENTS. YOU HAVE CREATED GLASS WITH MANY FLAWS. YOU HAVE TASTED THE FLESH OF SONGBIRDS. I SEE THESE WRONGS IN YOU. YOU ARE UNREPENTANT OF THEM. AND NOW, AS I EMERGE, YOU DO NOT MEET ME WITH THE FLAME AND THE SPARROW.”
• “I am sorrowful. I am sorrowful that I happened to be born into a world where being disgusted with yourself was what you were supposed to be. I am sorrowful that my fellow countrymen feel that being human is something to repress, something ugly, something nasty. It’s … It’s just a fucking shame. It really is.”
• Children at play stop where they are and listen.
  “YOU HAVE LAIN WITH ONE ANOTHER IN JOY.”
  A street sweeper, still holding his broom, slowly turns to look up into the sky.
  “YOU HAVE BUILT FLOORS OF WHITE STONE.”
  The elderly men at the Ghoshtok-Solda Dinner Club stare at one another, then at their bottles of wine and whiskey.
  “YOU HAVE EATEN BRIGHT FRUITS,” says the voice, “AND ALLOWED THEIR SEEDS TO ROT IN DITCHES.”
  In a barbershop beside the Solda, the barber, stunned, has removed most of an old man’s mustache; the old man, just as stunned, has yet to realize.
• “So I mean that even if this does work, there is a very good chance I may overdose, and die.” <> Mulaghesh shrugs. “Yeah, probably. Welcome to war. Let’s see if you can do something before you actually die, though, okay?”
• * Miracles are just formal requests, Shara thinks wildly. It’s like having a form preprinted and filled out and handing it in to get exactly what you want! But you don’t always have to do it that way! You can make it up as you go along, so long as you do it right!
• The good ship Mornvieva, once occupied by twenty-three souls, now occupied by one sole stowaway, cuts through the clouds and the wind like a dream. Sigrud stands at the wheel, puffing at his pipe, and makes a slight adjustment south-southwest. Sigrud laughs. He can’t remember the last time he laughed. Ship-borne for the first time in years and smoking his pipe.… It is a blessing he never thought he’d have again.
• The Restorationists bet everything on Saypur never expecting air-to-ground combat; but they, similarly, never considered air-to-air.
• “You’ve never experienced the destructive capabilities of our modern age,” she says. “Perhaps the modern rejects you as much as you reject it.”
  The Divinity raises its head to look at her, but otherwise does nothing.
  “Maybe you can keep fighting. But I don’t think you have it in you. This world doesn’t want you anymore. And even more, you don’t want it.”
  The Divinity angrily says, “I AM PAIN.”
  Shara stands before it and says, “And you are pleasure.”
• It is Kolkan: the stern man made of clay and stone.
  It is Jukov: the skinny, laughing man of fur and bells.
  It is both of them: both Divinities twisted together, shoved together, melded into one person. Kolkan’s head, with Jukov’s warped face appearing at Kolkan’s neck; one arm on one side, a forked arm with two clenched fists on the other; two legs, but one leg has two feet.…
• Shara is still trying to come to grips with the reality of what is happening, yet Olvos is so profoundly unlike anything she expected a god to be that she is not sure what to think: Olvos’s manner is like that of a fishwife or a seamstress rather than a Divinity. “That’s why you left the Continent? Because you disagreed with the Great Expansion?”
• *“A people believe in a god”—she completes the circle—“and the god tells them what to believe. It’s a cycle, like water flowing into the ocean, then up to the skies, and into rain, which falls and flows into the ocean. But it is different in that ideas have weight. They have momentum. Once an idea starts, it spreads and grows and gets heavier and heavier until it can’t be resisted, even by the Divine.”
• That night I chose, like all the other Divinities, to unite, form Bulikov, and live in what we thought was peace.… But I was profoundly troubled by this experience.”
  “Then how could you leave?” asks Shara. “If you were tied or tethered to the wishes of your people, how could they let you abandon the world?”
  Olvos gives Shara a scornful look: Can’t you put this together yourself?
  “Unless,” Shara says, “your people asked you to leave.…”
• * “Humans are strange, Shara Komayd. They value punishment because they think it means their actions are important—that they are important. You don’t get punished for doing something unimportant, after all. Just look at the Kolkashtanis—they think the whole world was set up to shame and humiliate and punish and tempt them.… It’s all about them, them, them, them! The world is full of bad things, hurtful things, but it’s still all about them!
• “Clever Jukov figured it all out when the Kaj invaded. He understood that he had, through his own pride and arrogance, fathered the death of the Continent and the other Divinities. Before he hid himself with Kolkan, his last bitter act was to use a familiar to tell this fearsome invader the truth of his parentage.”
  “I see,” says Shara. “The Kaj fell into a deep depression after killing Jukov, and practically drank himself to death.”
  “Bitterness begets bitterness,” Olvos says. “Shame begets shame.”
  “ ‘What is reaped is what is sown,’ ” Shara says, “ ‘and what is sown is what is reaped.’ ”
• And for all those years, I knew that the balance of power in this world, this brave new land of politics and machinery, was predicated purely on lies. Saypur and the Continent hate one another, completely oblivious that each is now the product of the other. They are not separate—they are intertwined.
• * Each time people believed I came from somewhere new, I came from that place—and it was like I’d never come from any other place, and I never knew what I was before.” She takes a breath. “I am Olvos. I pulled the burning, golden coal of the world from the fires of my own heart. I fashioned the stars from my own teardrops when I mourned for the sun during the very first night. And I was born when all the dark of the world became too heavy, and scraped against itself, and made a spark—and that spark was me. This is all I know. I do not know what I was before I knew these things. I have looked, and tried to understand my origins—but history, as you may know, is much like a spiral staircase that gives the illusion of going up, but never quite goes anywhere.”
• Mulaghesh blinks and laughs hollowly. “You want me to play Sagresha to your Kaj? I told you, I’m not interested in promotion. I’m out of the game.” “And I’m going to change the game entirely,” says Shara.
• “Efrem Pangyui deduced the Kaj’s parentage in Bulikov,” says Shara. “And he, being the dutiful and honorable historian of Saypur, sent back a report without realizing he was signing his own death warrant—for him, the truth was the truth, and hiding it never occurred to him.” <> Vinya, who has resisted upper-middle age for nearly fifteen years, sits in her chair with the slow movements of an old woman.
• “I understand my stock has risen in Ghaladesh these days,” Shara says, with a quaint pout of modesty. “I am, after all, the only person since the Kaj to have killed a Divinity—two Divinities, technically, to the Kaj’s three. This, after Urav. They haven’t ever crowned another Kaj since Avshakta, but I don’t doubt that a few people in Saypur are discussing it. I believe that when I speak, I will be listened to. And as such, I believe your time in the Ministry is over, Auntie.”
• Time renders all people and all things silent, she thinks. But I will speak of you, of all of you, for all the time I have.