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373 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1988
"It's 1976. The sky is low and full of clouds. The gray clouds are bulbous and wrinkled and shiny. The sky looks cerebral. Under the sky is a field, in the wind. A pale highway runs beside the field. Lots of cars go by. One of the cars stops by the side of the highway. Two small children are brought out of the car by a young woman with a loose face. A man at the wheel of the car stares straight ahead. The children are silent and have very white skin. The woman carries a grocery bag full of something heavy. Her face hangs loose over the bag. She brings the bag and the white children to a wooden fencepost, by the field, by the highway. The children's hands, which are small, are placed on the wooden post. The woman tells the children to touch the post until the car returns. She gets in the car and the car leaves. There is a cow in the field near the fence. The children touch the post. The wind blows. Lots of cars go by. They stay that way all day."
"Each received, to the varying degrees their respective pains allowed, an intuition of the askew as, in the neatly stacked slices of lit space between the executive and the distant lament of a custodian's vacuum, the Building's very silence took on expression: they sensed, almost spinally, the slow release of great breath, a spatial sigh, a slightly sly movement of huge lids cracked in wakened affinity with the emptiness that was, after all, the reasonable executive realizes, half the Building's total day..
"Right and wrong ain't words...They're feelings. In your guts and intestines and such. Not words. Not songs with guitars. They're what make you feel like you do. They're inside you. Your heart and digestion. Like the folks you personally love."
"We get claws, the shape of our face is the shape of our skull, our lips retreat back from big teeth like we're baring to snarl. Sharp, snarling, old: who should wonder at how nobody cares if I hurt, except another snarler?
"..The poor lucky reader's not that scene's target, though he hears the keen whistle and feels the razored breeze and knows that there but for the grace of the Pater of us all lies someone, impaled red as the circle's center, prone and arranged, each limb a direction, on land so borderless there's nothing to hold your eye except food and sky and the shadow of one slow clock..."