Going Zero: A Novel

glissando

If anything went wrong I was to leave a classified ad in the Washington Post—physical paper, mind you—addressed to Lonely Girl. But nothing went wrong, so I never had to leave an emergency SOS. Now, are you people sure you don’t want any soup? It’s pea and ham. My mother’s recipe. She’s dead. We didn’t get along, but what can you do? The bitch coul

the unseen shift by the state from monitoring to control, the last chapter of the long tale of democracy, free will deformed into willing compliance.

Lakshmi explains that the term was coined when they looked through the lurid material all the candidates actually watched on their screens. “Erika, wasn’t it actually you who said it was enough to make the angels weep? Anyway, it stuck.”

Thus, with each passing day, each slipping hour, he grows in confidence. Sure of his concealment, it’s just a waiting game. He’s basically won already.

If she hadn’t done all that, Fusion would’ve concentrated more resources on archive photos, probably discovered this cute little switcheroo days earlier.

do you ensure you have control? By being excellent, by rising to a position of command, whereupon you are in a position to order the world as you see fit. He believes winning—and he is surely a winner—is just the by-product of truly knowing yourself and harvesting your special gifts, those acuities, those tiny grains of genius that everybody posses

she knows already that it will only be some unsatisfactory fraction of what had existed before. In the end, some things—air, avocados, railroad tracks, a note on a violin, silence, trust between lovers—need to be perfect.

proprioception