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Edwin is capable of action but prone to inertia. He likes sitting by his window. There’s a constant movement of people and ships. He doesn’t want to leave, so he stays.
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It is a sea of mud.
Sometimes you don’t know you’re going to throw a grenade until you’ve already pulled the pin.
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“Does anyone want us anywhere?” he heard himself ask. “Why do we assume these far-flung places are ours?”
They reach the settlement of Caiette in the early evening.
It’s the lightest sketch of civilizations, caught between the forest and the sea. He doesn’t belong here.
into a flash of darkness, like sudden blindness or an eclipse. He has an impression of being in some vast interior, something like a train station or a cathedral, and there are notes of violin music, there are other people around him, and then an incomprehensible sound—
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He walked into the forest, and then what? He remembers darkness; notes of music; a sound he couldn’t identify; all of it over in a heartbeat. Did it really happen?
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“Edwin,” Roberts says, but Edwin’s already at the door. Another priest is approaching, climbing the stairs that lead up from the road: Father Pike, just returning from a visit to the cannery or the logging camp, his shock of white hair all but shining in the sunlight. Edwin looks over his shoulder, into an empty church with its back door hanging open. Roberts has fled.
Gaspery seemed foreign in a way that she couldn’t quite parse.
“but after Alkaitis abandoned her and fled the country, I guess Vincent got some training and certifications and went to sea as a cook on a container ship.”
But her thoughts shifted toward Jonathan, Vincent’s former husband, living out his life in a luxury hotel in Dubai. The thought of him being there, wherever he was, ordering room service and asking to have the sheets changed and swimming in the hotel pool—while Vincent was dead—was an abomination.
The things we see when we’re young.
There’s something to be said for looking up at a clear blue sky and knowing that it isn’t a dome.
She talked for some time about a catastrophic rip in the space-time continuum, but Olive was too tired to follow.
if you’re talking about outbreaks of infectious disease, isn’t fairly well contained essentially the same thing as not contained at all? Focus,
Remember that you’re lucky to get to travel. Remember that some people never leave this planet.
the explanation touches upon the root of our fear: illness still carries a terrible mystery.”
Paradox: I want to go home but I could watch Earth’s sunrises forever.
Illness frightens us because it’s chaotic. There’s an awful randomness about it.”
“Oh. It’s surreal, actually. I wrote three books that no one noticed, no distribution beyond the moon colonies, and then…it’s like slipping into a parallel universe,” Olive said. “When I published Marienbad, I somehow fell into a bizarre upside-down world where people actually read my work. It’s extraordinary. I hope I never get used to
What is time travel if not a security problem?
We knew it was coming,
In the second half of the novel, her character Gaspery-Jacques had the line tattooed on his left arm.
What stops you, and turns you cold?
Everything offended Jessica, which is inevitable when you move through the world in search of offense.
Jessica with her book about coming of age in the moon colonies. Olive
She didn’t grow up longing for Earth or experience her life as a continual displacement, thank you.
no good chickens
The room was on a high floor with a wall of glass, and the city rolled away beneath them.
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“Olive, this is Gaspery Roberts, Contingencies Magazine.
“Where your character Willis hears the violin and he’s…transported.”
“If her parents loved her,” Meiying said, “it would have felt like the end of the world.”
The point is that we’re orbiting a star, and all stars eventually die.”
“But if the star dies,” I said to Zoey, “obviously the Earth’s moon goes with it.”
The first moon colony was built on the silent flatlands of the Sea of Tranquility, near where the Apollo 11 astronauts had landed in a long-ago century.
found myself wondering what Talia Anderson’s thoughts were when she gazed out at the moonscape.
The idea with the simulation hypothesis is, we can’t rule out the possibility that all of reality is a simulation.”
There’s a low-level, specific pain in having to accept that putting up with you requires a certain generosity of spirit in your loved ones.
“Paul James Smith. Twenty-first-century composer and video artist.”
We knew it was coming. We knew it was coming and we prepared accordingly, or at least that’s what we told our children—and ourselves—in the decades that followed.
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We knew it was coming but we didn’t quite believe it, so we prepared in low-key, unobtrusive ways—“Why do we have a whole shelf of canned fish?” Willis asked his husband, who said something vague about emergency preparedness— —Because of that ancient horror, too embarrassingly irrational to be articulated aloud: if you say the name of the thing you fear, might you attract that thing’s attention? This is difficult to admit, but in those early weeks we were vague about our fears because saying the word pandemic might bend the pandemic toward us. We knew it was coming and we were breezy about it.
Pandemics don’t approach like wars, with the distant thud of artillery growing louder every day and flashes of bombs on the horizon. They arrive in retrospect, essentially. It’s disorienting. The pandemic is far away and then it’s all around you, with seemingly no intermediate step. Dov, practicing his lines in front of the bedroom mirror after the community theater closed: “Is this the promised end?”
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(We were still thinking in terms of getting work done. The most shocking thing in retrospect was the degree to which all of us completely missed the point.) “God,” Willis said, a few days before the schools closed, but after the news headlines had started, “this all seems so retro.”
—a fleeting hallucination of forest, fresh air, trees rising around him, a summer’s day—
because what had just come over him? That flash of darkness, then the forest rising around him, what was that?
It hit him all at once: an afterlife.
The darkness was death, he told himself. The forest was the after.
