The smell of things burning that aren’t meant to burn wafts across the city: shoe polish, rat poison, toothpaste, piano strings, hernia trusses, baby cribs, Indian clubs. And hair and skin. By this time, hair and skin.
She didn’t know if his perfectionism canceled out his loss of ambition, or if they were two sides of the same coin. When you stood between somebody you loved and death, it was hard to be awake and it was hard to sleep.
She wasn’t so special, maybe. She was his ideal, but an early conception of it, and he would get over it in time.
Obviously, doctor, you’ve never been a thirteen year-old girl.
Her eyes shone, burned, intent on her mission as only a creature with no doubts as to either Creation’s glory or its meaninglessness could be.
We had never known her. They brought us here to find that out.
I was struck dumb by the sight of this beloved face working itself up into what looked like hatred.
She walked to the cupboard, then stopped and folded her hands behind her. “It’s private. Do you mind?” she said, and Peter Sissen sped down the stairs, blushing, and after thanking Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon, hurried off to tell us that Lux Lisbon was bleeding between the legs that very instant, while the fish flies made the sky filthy and the streetlamps came on.
Something sick at the heart of the country had infected the girls.
More and more, people forgot about the individual reasons why the girls may have killed themselves, the stress disorders and insufficient neurotransmitters, and instead put the deaths down to the girls’ foresight in predicting decadence.
A few of us grew brave enough to insert our legs between theirs and to press our agony against them.
We passed the sticky receiver from ear to ear, the drumbeats so regular we might have been pressing our ears to the girls’ chests.
We couldn’t imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm. And we had to smear our muzzles in their last traces, of mud marks on the floor, trunks kicked out from under them, we had to breathe forever the air of the rooms in which they killed themselves.
I hadn’t gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it’s only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you’re time-traveling. In this life we grow backwards.
Derrida is my absolute god!
There’s a kind of purity in that, the purity of childhood.
Cecilia appeared in our consciousness at odd moments, most often as we were just waking up, or staring out a car-pool window streaked with rain – she rose up in her wedding dress, muddy with the afterlife, but then a horn would honk, or our radio alarms would unleash a popular song, and we snapped back to reality.
Sure. Martinis. We can pretend we’re Salinger characters.
He explained that he had arrived at college without knowing much about religion, and how, from reading English literature, he’d begun to realize how ignorant he was. The world had been formed by beliefs he knew nothing about. ‘That was the beginning,’ he said, ’realizing how stupid I was.
It’s sad to think about those girls,” he said. “What a waste of life.
Actually, none of this might have been spoken.