“I thought I had depth, that there was my surface self and then my own real self inside, but look at this game. The surface and the underworld, day and night, both are on the same flat screen.”

Samantha and then stopped to examine my wife’s reflection in the window on the right side of the plane. I could see the lights from the airport, the red and green dots along the runway, on the other side of my wife’s transparent profile. Samantha was a spectral presence on the surface of the window and to see the world outside I had to look through

“Think about those Road Runner cartoons where the Coyote runs off the side of a cliff and then remains suspended in midair. He’ll only fall if he looks down,” Dad said. And this was the secret. Life itself was a matter of refusing to look down or, if one couldn’t avoid looking, then the trick was to find a way to look without seeing. People could

You realize that this story is very nearly finished now and pause at the end of this sentence in order to consider other, more satisfying, conclusions. The space you can see through, this hole in the world, doesn’t exist. It’s just a trick that I’m pulling. It’s a trick that you agree to let me pull even as I give the trick away. Somehow the trick

Not everyone was a transvestite, but nobody was who he or she normally was. Everything was switched around, and somebody rolled out barrels of ice cream.

Holding onto an idea of her identity, even though the idea is a fiction, is what she’s aiming at.

Unreality, the disappearance of a center, meant that I had a destiny.

“I want to tell you something,” I said. Samantha nodded. “Okay. But I don’t think it will help you much.” “What’s that?” “I’m pretty sure I don’t exist,” she said.

Every character in every story is both limited by the structure of the language employed to tell the story and is the very fiction that transforms the language into the story. Without the fiction of a character or a story, without the emptiness that is at the center of all the accidents, all the burning coals or imposed styles, without an