I know that I should not have done what I just did. I do not understand the madness that made me. I should get on the phone, somehow, call an ambulance, somehow, get these problems dealt with, somehow, but I live in fear of what I will find out if I do manage to stagger into an emergency room and somebody is able to tell me exactly what has become of my left hand.
Rebecca’s eyes inevitably wandered to the wrists, which ended in thick silver bands, a lot like bracelets except for the flat bottoms where arms should have emerged. They, Rebecca knew, contained not just the life support—without which her husband’s hands would just be graying meat—but also his most recent memory backup, without which everything he had ever been, and everything he had ever done, would now be gone.
The gate was an obscene bas-relief in which hundreds of miniature human forms coupled in combinations of two or three, or four, no two positions alike, all possible sexual combinations represented. It was the most intricate work of art Jin had ever seen with his own eyes, and it moved him not at all.
Fortune entered the gaming floor, where instead of heading straight for a table she wandered among them, noting the places where people wept and howled like wolves, emptied but not yet judged broke.
Oblivion is not quite instantaneous; his neurons all fire at the moment his brain goes soggy with blood, giving him, in his last instant, an overwhelming taste of peppermint.
What did you see on those faces? Was it fear? Resignation? Or apology?
Amber had heard of a method, possibly only an urban legend, that some hunters reputedly use to capture monkeys. It involved placing a fruit inside the knot-hole of a tree. The monkey reaches in and grabs the treat, but with it in his grasp, his fist is too large to be withdrawn. He cannot bring himself to drop the treasure in his possession, and so he remains trapped, in its possession, for however long it takes the clever hunter to return with a net. Here with this demented old man, this close to terrible knowledge about the author who had come to consume her academic life, Amber could have demurred and walked out without the dread knowledge that was now being offered to her. But it was impossible, not with the secret within her grasp, and a little voice inside her asked, forlornly, if the monkeys ever understood the nature of the trap that had imprisoned them.
There are three parts to me now. The old, remembered part, which doesn’t have a voice. It stands back and watches, appalled, at everything that happens, everything I do.