a symbiosis that made her old life obsolete, had been temporary.

“I still enjoy being alive, if that’s what you’re asking,” she said. And then, in a phrase that haunted Chris, “But I’m tired of my history.”

Roxy marvels at the deep absorption of the players, who never seem impatient. It’s as if the rest of life has slowed to match the pace of the game.

These men all moved to California recently, driven by a lust for space that can’t be satisfied by old cities with their tinge of Europe and horse carts and history. There is an ungoverned feel to California’s mountains and deserts and reckless coast.

Alone by choice on Saturday nights, writing by an open window in his studio apartment, Gregory had experienced a kind of euphoria: a swelling, bursting, yearning hunger that had something in common with lust but included everyone, from the revelers outside his window to the carousers down the hall. He was where he wanted to be, and needed nothing

I see now that the place I’ve been yearning for is my own imagination.

He’s empathetic to the point of telepathy.

But knowing everything is too much like knowing nothing; without a story, it’s all just information.

She had always been observant, but now her watchfulness was exaggerated to the point of aberration, like a distended limb.