“What’s the fuckin’ diff?” she trilled in her Tweetie Pie voice. “Billy’s a funny boy, a natural scam artist, one of the greats. Who knows for how long this is?”
…
Arriving at the furriers, they looked like an oil sheikh and his moll. Mimi tried on the five figure numbers, waiting for Billy’s lead. At length he said, You like that one? It’s nice. Billy, she whispered, it’s forty thousand, but he was already smooth-talking the assistant: it was Friday afternoon, the banks were closed, would the store take a cheque. “Well, by now they know he’s an oil sheikh, so they say yes, we leave with the coat, and he takes me into another store right around the block, points to the coat, and says, I just bought this for forty thousand dollars, here’s the receipt, will you give me thirty for it, I need the cash, big weekend ahead.” — Mimi and Billy had been kept waiting while the second store rang the first, where all the alarm bells went off in the manager’s brain, and five minutes later the police arrived, arrested Billy for passing a dud cheque, and he and Mimi spent the weekend in jail. On Monday morning the banks opened and it turned out that Billy’s account was in credit to the tune of forty-two thousand one hundred and seventeen dollars, so the cheque had been good all the time. He informed the furriers of his intentions to sue them for two millions dollars in damages, defamation of character, open and shut case, and within forty-eight hours they settled out of court for $250,000 on the nail. “Don’t you love him?” Mimi asked Chamcha. “The boy’s a genius. I mean, this was class.”
…one sees parents clutching their children, in a frozen embrace that will never let go. The beautiful young daughter with blue eyes and blond hair will never stop smiling the smile she smiles now, will never lose this soft pink glow on her cheeks, will never grow wrinkled or tired, will never get injured, will never unlearn what her parents have taught her, will never think thoughts that her parents don’t know, will never know evil, will never tell her parents that she does not love them, will never leave her room with the view of the ocean, will never stop touching her parents as she does now.
…
Some say it is best not to go near the center of time. Life is a vessel of sadness, but it is noble to live life, and without time there is no life. Others disagree. They would rather have an eternity of contentment, even if that eternity were fixed and frozen, like a butterfly mounted in a case.
A man stands at the graveside of his friend, throws a handful of dirt on the coffin, feels the cold April rain on his face. But he does not weep. He looks ahead to the day when his friend’s lungs will be strong, when his friend will be out of his bed and laughing, when the two of them will drink ale together, go sailing, talk. He does not weep. He waits longingly for a particular day he remembers in the future when he and his friend will have sandwiches on a low flat table, when he will describe his fear of growing old and unloved and his friend will nod gently, when the rain will slide down the glass of the window.
Most people have learned how to live in the moment. The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past. And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence. Rather, each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own. Families comfort a dying uncle not because of a likely inheritance, but because he is loved at that moment. Employees are hired not because of their résumés, but because of their good sense in interviews. Clerks trampled by their bosses fight back at each insult, with no fear for their future. It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glace given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.
The bald Caucasian came back. His facial expression slowly changed into a combination of nostalgia, rhetoric, and calmness. He said the Fukanese run Chinatown now. He said he sold fireworks since he was 11. He said everyone used to eat well in Chinatown. He said the Fukanese fucked up Chinatown. He asked me what part of China I was from. I said I was from Taiwan. “You know that little island off China?” I said. “I know,” he said. “I am geographically sound.”
Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing concentric circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird.
Gentle socks pamper them by day, and shoes cobbled of leather fortify them, but my toes hardly notice. All they’re interested in is turning out toenails—semitransparent, flexible sheets of a hornlike material, as defense against—whom? Brutish, distrustful as only they can be, my toes labor ceaselessly at manufacturing that frail armament. They turn their backs on the universe and its ecstasies in order to spin out, endlessly, those ten pointless projectile heads, which are cut away time and again by the sudden snips of a Solingen. By the ninetieth twilit day of their prenatal confinement, my toes had cranked up that extraordinary factory. And when I am tucked away in Recoleta, in an ash-colored house bedecked with dry flowers and amulets, they will still be at their stubborn work, until corruption at last slows them—them and the beard upon my cheeks.
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