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208 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 1998
He knew so many people who had died that in his present state of dissociation he could begin to contemplate his own end as commonplace -- a flurry of burying or cremating, a welt of grief raised, then subsiding as life swept on.
There wasn't really much else to do. Make something, and die.
We know so little about each other. We lie mostly submerged, like ice floes, with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white. Here was a rare sight below the waves, of a man's privacy and turmoil, of his dignity upended by the overpowering necessity of pure fantasy, pure thought, by the irreducible human element -- mind.
Was it boredom or sadism that made the shirt service people do up every single button?
(In the meeting) Everyone nodded, nobody agreed.