The origin of my body and my mind didn't matter. I, the part of me that learned, that called on my memories, that knew I'd pulled a plant like this before, that had moved this hand to do it, was fifteen years old and innocent of evil or good. Neutral. From here forward, I was blank tape; what would be recorded there, and when, and why, was up to me.

I don't trust memory, anyway. Why should I? Memories, however undependable, ought to be the stuff on the sand when the tides of experience recedes. As long as they're part of that process, there's something valid about them, something that ties them to real life.

Have you seen it...Singin' in the rain, have you seen it?"...His answer was all in his face, scornful and baffled at once. Money makes me ask stupid questions. He wanted it, of course, because someone else didn't have it. "Debbie Reynolds dies in the end," I told him.

Suddenly I could imagine all the things my body might do when I wasn't there to stop it and I felt so vile they might as well have happened. Maybe they had; they just hadn't left marks. I thought about a future full of blank spaces, and I knew I couldn't bear it. If that was the future, I had to escape it.

Happiness, in the land of Deals, is measured on a sliding scale. What makes you happy? A long white silent car with smoked-glass windows, with a chauffeur and a stocked bar and two beautiful objects of desire in the back seat? An apartment in a nice part of town? A kinder lover? A place to stand that's out of the wind? A brief cessation of pain? It depends on what you have at the moment I ask that question, and what you don't have. Wait a little, just a little. The scale will slide again.

Her coral liptint was faintly luminous; when she pressed her lips together, they made a glowing rosebud in her face.

Her skin was translucent pale, the complexion of the rich. Money made an excellent sunblock.

It's a cheval," said Mick, huge eyed. ..."A mindless, soulless, sexless shell, genderless as a baby doll," she said to me--at me--whoever she was talking to, it wasn't me. She didn't believe I existed.