There was this hot, yellowy stillness the air always got in the minutes before the last bell, as if it were stiffening itself to be shattered.

Was she Minh Thuy, finally, or was she Jenny? But the time when there had been a meaningful difference between the two would come to seem like a tiny neighborhood where you couldn't decide which house was yours. Which felt important when you were high above, you thought, in the foothills, but not so much at the truer remove of a continent, where the lives you'd lived and the places you'd come from, dwindled to a single point on the horizon, in the incorrigibly distant past.

Charlie tried to focus on what she was saying, but his head felt packed with gauze. Like no one could reach him in here, where it hurt.

Even the beauty of the landscape was an abstraction, like the beauty of a man in an advertisement for a cologne you could not smell.

Detonations crash in from nearby like walls she's a void at the center of.

Reading it was like subletting a small apartment in someone else's head.

Then she spotted in the corner, glowing wonderfully, a Wurlitzer jukebox. ' Holy shit!' It was like being on a commuter train through the Bronx and seeing among the piles of crushed cars a pasture with a lone white horse.

Sitting in an armchair under yellow lamplight in front of a black window in an apartment whose only other light was the milky rainbow of the Wurlitzer, Richard was like a giant, welcoming ear. Or a reflecting device, beaming her best self back at her.

Maybe the siren was was a fire truck? Mercer couldn't see one anywhere, but like some bounding St. Bernard of the metaphysical, he couldn't quite let go of the belief that there must be an objective reality out there, beyond his own head.