You understand, I could no more have turned back than have gone back in time. My free will was compromised, if only by the severe temptation of the unknown. To have quit that place, to have returned to the surface, without rounding that corner … my imagination would have tormented me forever. In that moment, I had convinced myself I would rather

kind of panic for a moment, in which the walls suddenly had a fleshy aspect to them, as if we traveled inside of the gullet of a beast.

I saw a tower, plunging into the ground. The thought that we stood at its summit made me a little dizzy.

I had never talked to the frogs; I despised anthropomorphizing animals. “So what has changed if we wouldn’t have liked each other as kids?” I asked. “Oh, I would have liked you despite that,” he said, grinning. “You would have fascinated me, and I would have followed you anywhere. Without hesitation.”

She left an empty space that was shocking to me, as if the reverse had actually happened: as if a face had suddenly floated into view out of the darkness. I gasped, which drew a stare from the psychologist. The anthropologist was too busy staring down into the stairwell to notice any of it.

There are certain kinds of deaths that one should not be expected to relive, certain kinds of connections so deep that when they are broken you feel the snap of the link inside you.

small rectangle of black metal with a glass-covered hole in the middle. If the hole glowed red, we had thirty minutes to remove ourselves to “a safe place.” We were not told what the device measured or why we should be afraid should it glow red.

me. I did not feel as if I were a person but simply a receiving station for a series of overwhelming transmissions.

He contained within him now the very distance he had in so many subtle and not so subtle ways accused me of in the past.