The Shards: A novel

I’d checked out sometime during my junior year and was performing a pantomime in which I only noticed the edges of things,

began engaging in flirtatious ways that I thought I wasn’t quite worthy of. But looking at photos of myself from that senior year I now realize I actually was cute enough to warrant their attention,

He was just part of the overall erasure that I was enacting: the eradication of my real self into the tangible participant who saw everything as normal.

a time before video surveillance and cellphones and DNA profiling, when serial killers were allowed to be cavalier and bountiful: the number of murders committed by just one or a duo could hit twenty or thirty, fifty or sixty, during that particular decade. (Mass shooters have replaced them.)

The basic reason why the weekend happened was, I realize in retrospect, sex, and the hope tied to the sex. It was about desire in its simplest form, and a purity that I would never experience again.

because movies were a religion in that moment, they could change you, alter your perception, you could rise toward the screen and share a moment of transcendence, all the disappointments and fears would be wiped away for a few hours in that church: movies acted like a drug for me. But they were also about control: you were a voyeur sitting in the d

If you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself.

MANY YEARS AGO I REALIZED THAT A BOOK, a novel, is a dream that asks itself to be written in the same way we fall in love with someone: the dream becomes impossible to resist, there’s nothing you can do about it, you finally give in and succumb even if your instincts tell you to run the other way because this could be, in the end, a dangerous game—

The day really became effortless once you faked it and it actually became more real because of your changed demeanor; the act became the reality and it affected everything in what seemed like a positive way. In fact, it was preferable to reality.