My name is Adnan Nassar and I am Palestinian-American,” he said in a rush. “I came to this country from Syria nine years ago and have since then earned American citizenship and am assistant manager of the Pizza Pad on Highway 6.
In retelling these events, I have fought against a tendency to sentimentalize Julian, to make him seem very saintly – basically to falsify him – in order to make our veneration of him seem more explicable; to make it seem something more, in short, than my own fatal tendency to try to make interesting people good.
All night long you say offensive things about Arabs,” he screamed. “You don’t know what Arab is.” He beat on his chest with his fist. “I know it, in my heart.
Struggling against his weight, reeling backward, I knocked the fishbowl from its pedestal and it crashed to the floor. Goldfish flopping all around my feet, amidst the shards of broken glass. Someone banged on the door. In my terror I let go of the body and it fell back into the tub with a hideous slap and a spray of water and I woke up.
If you can’t plan it in advance, you have to see how it goes as you do it.
But how,” said Charles, who was close to tears, “how can you possibly justify cold-blooded murder?” Henry lit a cigarette. “I prefer.
I mean, this man was not Voltaire we killed. But still. It’s a shame. I feel bad about it.
No. I am rather curious to see what it is like. Besides, I think it’s good to change the place where one sleeps from time to time. I believe it gives one more interesting dreams.
I hate Gucci. It’s so expensive, but it’s so ugly too, isn’t it? I think they make it ugly on purpose. And yet people buy it out of sheer perversity.
As we walked outside together, into the Christmas crowds, I felt unsteady and sorrowful; and the ribbon-wrapped buildings, the glitter of windows only deepened the oppressive sadness: dark winter skies, gray canyon of jewels and furs and all the power and melancholy of wealth.
She was the Queen who finished out the suit of dark Jacks, dark King and Joker.
I never got used to the way the horizon there could just erase itself and leave you marooned, adrift, in an incomplete dreamscape that was like a sketch for the world you knew, in an amnesia-land, a kind of skewed Heaven where the old landmarks were recognizable but spaced too far apart, and disarranged, and made terrible by the emptiness around them.
But still I was young.
Yet even in death, my dad was ineradicable, no matter how hard I tried to wish him out of the picture– for there he always was, in my hands and my voice and my walk, in my darting sideways glance as I left the restaurant with Hobie, the very set of my head recalling his old, preening habit of checking himself out in any mirror-like surface.
The gesture was, to me, tremendously touching and all of a sudden I realised I had been wrong about these people. These were good people, common people; the salt of the earth; people whom I should count myself fortunate to know.
And if beauty is terror, then what is desire?
I am a Californian by birth and also, I have recently discovered, by nature. The last is something I admit only now, after the fact.
Cloke Rayburn, a school friend of Corcoran’s and one of those who first notified police, said that Corcoran ’is a real straight guy – definitely not mixed up in drugs or anything like that.
Nowhere, ever, have the hideous mechanics of birth and copulation and death – those monstrous upheavals of life that the Greeks call miasma, defilement – been so brutal or been painted up to look so pretty; have so many people put so much faith in lies and mutability and death death death.
Consequently their relationship with their dead brother was of the most intimate sort, his strong, bright, immutable character shining changelessly against the vagueness and vacillation of their own characters, and the characters of people that they knew; and they grew up believing that this was due to some rare, angelic incandescence of nature on Robin’s part, and not at all to the fact that he was dead.