Now Wait for Last Year

In a town where everything is legal, he thought, and nothing achieves worth, you are wrenched back into childhood. Placed among your blocks and toys, with all your universe within grasp.

You know how the Russians got rid of Beria? Beria carried a pistol into the Kremlin, which was against the law; he had it in his briefcase and they stole his briefcase and shot him with his own pistol. You think matters at the top have to be complex? There're simple solutions average people always overlook; that's the main defect of the mass man

I have an idea what they want, but we'll have to wait and see. Better not to anticipate; that way you do their work for them, you sort of turn on yourself and do yourself in.

“That will be one dollar and ten cents US plus a twenty-five-cent tip.“

«Screw you and the tip, Kathy said, opening her purse; her hands shook and she could barely get out the money.

“Yes, miss, the autonomic cab said obediently.“

She paid and then stepped out.

If you or I ever really accepted the moral responsibility for what we've done in our lifetime—we'd drop dead or go mad. Living creatures weren't made to understand what they do.

Take the animals we've run over on the road, or the animals we eat. When I was a kid it was my monthly job to go out and poison rats. Did you ever watch a poisoned animal die? And not just one but scores of them, month after month. I don't feel it.

The blame. The load. Fortunately it doesn't register—it can't, because if it did there'd be no way I could go on. And that's how the entire human race gets by.

“If you were me, and your wife were sick, desperately so, with no hope of recovery, would you leave her?” […] “I’d stay with her [because] life is composed of reality configurations so constituted. To abandon her would be to say, I can’t endure reality as such. I have to have uniquely special easier conditions.”

Holding the package of g-Totex blau in the palm of his hand, he weighed it, experienced its mass. Felt the Earth’s attraction for it. Yes, he thought, the Earth likes even this. She accepts everything.

[Alive] in the past, perishing in the present, a corpse made of dust in the future.

“Like you yourself say, you should always be honest with yourself.”

“Oh yes, doctor. There’s definitely hope.” She said it in such a way as to convey to him that this was merely a philosophical answer; there was hope in every case, as far as she was concerned. So it meant nothing.

A day, Eric thought, made out of years.

Ahead, a tattoo parlor, modern and efficient, lit by a wall of glowing energy, the proprietor inside with his electric needle that did not touch the skin, only brushed near it as it wove a cat’s cradle of design.

The restless, roving bands of males who sought God knew what—they themselves didn’t know: their striving was the genuine primal under-urge of protoplasmic material itself. This irritable ceaseless motion had once carried life right out of the sea and onto land; creatures of the land now, they still roamed on, up one street and down another.

In a town where everything is legal, he thought, and nothing achieves worth, you are wrenched back into childhood.

Small tough Mexicans, youths wearing open-throated fur shirts, strode directly at him, their mouths agape as if they were strangling.

“What can I say,” he said, “except that maybe you’ve put your finger on the great central weak link of my life, Why it hasn’t got the meaning it should have.”

”[What] did they used [sic] to say in the last century? Let’s kick it up on the roof and see if it—some damn thing.”

Molinari had learned from the mistakes of the past. And had acted accordingly, in typical Piedmontese style. He had found a bizarre and colorfully idiosyncratic solution to his political problem.

[H]e wrote out from memory the formula for the antidote to JJ-180.