One day, he and William had been speeding toward each other; the next, careening away. But why?
As if it were possible for one person to care about another and still treat him or her like this.
But what if time worked the other way around?What if what his adolescent self had felt then was the ghost of his present one, sitting here on a sagging bench, beckoning him into his future?
And didn’t time always slow, anyway, the closer you came to what you wanted?
There is no such thing as a perfect phrase, or a private language, and . . . time only runs the one way.
Some people think the real them is whoever they are when they’re not around other people.
It’s like Charlie’s dreamed everything he lived through here.
Everything’s always changing, Charlie. We become who we are. The mask melts into the face.
Three’s all you need to change the world. Look at the Bolsheviks, or the Jimi Hendrix Experience.
And as he reached for William’s leg, the way a small child will reach for its mother’s, there welled up through a small hole in the bottom of Mercer’s soul a relief surpassing any he’d ever known in waking life.
William, an artist is someone who combines a desperate need to be understood with the fiercest love of privacy-
No amount of art, even of the Great American variety, can elevate you above, or insulate you from, the divisions, the cataclysms, of ordinary life.
Reading it was like subletting a small apartment in someone else’s head.
The sky was low and broody, but from here, near the treeline, you could see the forest rolling down into the valley, the lake tucked away like a pocket mirror.
Punk had picked the locks, sluiced out into the grid.
William loathed his family,’ Mercer said. ‘With cause.
As ever in the family Goodman, someone would have to swallow feelings here, and it was easier that it be Mercer.
And she learned that you couldn’t stockpile anything that mattered, really. Feelings, people, songs, sex, fireworks: they existed only in time, and when it was over, so were they.
Incidental, all of it, of course, but this was what this city bestowed that novels couldn’t: not what you needed in order to live, but what made the living worth doing in the first place.
In the wasteland of metro Boston, at thirteen, fourteen, his big dream had been of a gun to his own head, putting him out of his misery—a misery that by sophomore year of college was indistinguishable from everybody else’s.
You couldn’t trust people to be tomorrow what they had been yesterday.
No need to look to see if your former home has vanished yet into the humdrum gray behind you; you’ll be able to feel it, the sudden eclipse of the tractor beam the house puts out. Of its forcefield of sadness.
Darkness just loosens the mask. Sharpens the mind’s eye. Makes the color of a remembered pencil, or a tick of waxy red on a cracked plaster wall, as vivid as that taillight a few feet away.
It’s like we’ve been living in two different cities. You up here in all this marbled comfort, and me down there, killing myself in slow motion.
It’s a lesson some writers take a lifetime to learn: what makes us care about things is other people caring, too.
You assumed whatever was vivid to yourself was vivid to others, and vice versa, but she was going to make him spell it out, for the first time in either of their lives.
When he lifted his head, the sun seemed impossibly close. Science-fictionally close.
Whatever he’s feeling at a given moment is what he’s always been and always will be feeling.
And why love things you were destined to lose? Why let yourself feel things if the feelings were doomed to die?
Truly unconditional love was suffocating, in that it took so little notice of who you actually were.
So he’ll keep dragging himself up this bridge between possible worlds, this rickety ruin of light, trying to imagine it might matter if he makes it to the other side.
The absence of a skyline makes him doubt he’ll ever get where he’s going, and behind him, where he’s come from might as well not be there.
Charlie tried to focus on what she was saying, but his head felt packed with gauze. Like no one could reach him in here, where it hurt.
Who didn’t exist at the convergence of a thousand thousand stories?
That it may be the only thing the darkness makes clearer: who really matters is whoever you’re most desperate to see.
What galled him most was the presumption of these writer types, as if there weren’t actual people in the world, with jobs to do, appointments to keep, wives to appease, but only so much material.
And so there was a fundamental scepticism about the ability of any institution, even one like the novel, to tell us anything true.
When he went to go get groceries, though, he asked Mercer to come. ‘There’s no one I’d rather get stuck in a snowdrift and freeze to death with,’ William said.
And so she remained, like everything that mattered to me then, secret—to be pursued in the woods by moonlight, when I was supposed to be studying.
The reason we can say anything we want in America is that we know it makes no difference.
HOW TO MAKE A REVOLUTIONARY CONSCIOUSNESS IS: educate yourself. On the train, for example, read the same two pages of Das Kapital over and over, willing them to make sense.
There was this hot, yellowy stillness the air always got in the minutes before the last bell, as if it were stiffening itself to be shattered.
I didn’t drink, I told him, with that embarrassed feeling I got whenever I was reminded that I had a body, that I looked like anything at all.
A funny thing happened post-diagnosis. They put him on drugs, things went up and down, but he lived. He lived. It was like a waiting room where they kept not calling your name.
Her eyes were glistening, but for some reason he couldn’t reach out and touch her. It was like some gestures were so simple they were beyond him.
And you out there: Aren’t you somehow right here with me?
Famous revolutionary,’ you say, and the laughter pumps out of your chest like blood, great almost painful spurts of it splashing up the building faces toward the marquee moon.
There were two options—call the foul or don’t—and either way, he would lose, but there was a thrill here in this moment when actual combat might have replaced the shadowboxing he’d been doing for months now with every last person he loved.
He wanted to flee in shame, to the kitchenette, to the next room, to the fire escapes and rooftops and the places where the city ended.
Even the kids, behind the slice of streetscape floating in the glass, had mastered the art of pretending not to see.
Despite which, Charlie seems doomed to stumble around in the dark, clutching pieces of a puzzle he still can’t see.
Actual artists are like mythological creatures,’ she heard herself opine. ‘You hear about them, but a sighting’s pretty rare.
Good artists are always crazy, one way or another.
All these threads, like the ley-lines he’d read about in his Time-Life history books, converging on the Cicciaro girl, who lay there unaware, a glass-coffined beauty whose kingdom was in ruins.
The second this interminable wait ended, it would all start to fall away into the past, to become unreal.
Even before the letter he’d been divided: one part of him swanning with Jay Gatsby around an imaginary Gotham; the other part stolid and earthbound, nose to the deep fryer, in the stifling, sizzling South.
This isn’t Soviet Russia. This is America we’re talking about. For God’s sake, this is New York City.
Did you really think I’d steer you wrong?” Then William pointed to the wide-open country beyond the next ridge. “New York’s that way. My compass is unerring.
You’re hung up on something that’s never going to love you back.
No one, in the end, made it out of this life alive.
I respect Billy Joel, but I’m not a guy who’s gonna sit down and listen to the entire ‘Essential Billy Joel.’
I remember reading ‘The Hobbit’ on a car trip from Ohio to Mississippi and getting out at a rest-stop in Mississippi and feeling jet-lagged at my return from Middle-earth.