Sublime

I watched the local buildings’ numbers. They rose in stutters, interspersed with foreign alter spaces. In Besźel the area was pretty unpeopled, but not elsewhere across the border, and I had to unseeing dodge many smart young businessmen and -women. Their voices were muted to me, random noise. That aural fade comes from years of Besź care.

Drugs had given us the feeling that we could handle whatever situation might develop. We became aware, however, that drug usage was largely responsible for some of our worst predicaments. Some of us may spend the rest of our lives in jail for a drug-related crime.

The historic visions have been explained in many ways, as the result of epilepsy, self-hypnosis, changes in metabolism due to fasting, or actual intervention by gods—or drugs: Zoroastrianism began in a grand bath of haoma water,

When Cho missed the point, the girls had to call the campus police. They did not want him arrested, and they did not press charges. They just had to make clear that while Cho thought he was having one kind of encounter (a potentially romantic one), he was in fact having another kind of encounter (a potentially criminal one), and to show him that

None of them had the guts not to play into his delusions—ghouls and gangsters, ghosts and the mob. They would have let him get away with murder, I imagined. “America’s finest,” the prison guards of the civilized world, those police.