The building where the Siblings lived was known to some as Godzilla Apartments or simply the Godzilla. It was forty stories or so in an area of town houses and other structures of modest height and it created its own weather systems, with strong currents of air sometimes shearing down the face of the building and knocking old people to the pavement.
There was one cigarette smoker only and he was allowed to smoke all the cigarettes he wanted if he didn't mind appearing helpless and defective.
"You must be ultrasensitive, which I would never think from hearing the language you use."
Benny said, "We live that long? By the time you take a pee we all be fatal."
Keith caught him with another right, to the eye this time, and the man lifted him off the floor, an inch or two, and Keith threw some kidney punches that were mostly lost in bubblewrap.
"The second plane, by the time the second plane appears," he said, "we're all a little older and wiser."
The room was like a monk's cell with a pair of giant prayer wheels beating out a litany.
Soon the day is coming when nobody has to think about America except for the danger it brings. It is losing the center. It becomes the center of its own shit.
If you don't read a newspaper, you're never a day behind.
There were no photographs of that fall. She was the photograph, the photosensitive surface.
He'd thought of it in a remote way like landscape, like thinking of going back to the house where you grew up and walking along the back lanes and across the high meadow, the kind of thing you know you'll never do.
The whole business of being Rumsey was in shambles now.