Ask the Dust

J’ai ramassé mes cigarettes. Elle me haïssait tellement que la nuit et cette zone industrielle déserte en résonnaient. Je la comprenais. Ce n’est pas Arturo Bandini qu’elle haïssait. Pas vraiment. Elle haïssait seulement le fait qu’il ne se conformait pas à ce qu’elle attendait d’un homme. Elle voulait à toute force l’aimer mais elle n’y arrivait p

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Don’t be too cross at my role. You couldn’t understand, no matter how much I explained. You’re a brilliant physicist, your Rutherford chap et al. agree you’ve got a brilliant future, quite sure they’re right. But in some fundamentals you’re a dunce. The healthy can’t understand the emptied, the broken. You’d try to list all the reasons for living,

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then turned and put on his hat and turned his wet face to the wind and for a moment he held out his hands as if to steady himself or as if to bless the ground there or perhaps as if to slow the world that was rushing away and seemed to care nothing for the old or the young or rich or poor or dark or pale or he or she. Nothing for their struggles, n

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Marlowe stands close and lights it for him, smelling of hair cream and something else as well. The faintest whiff of brimstone. Marlowe enjoys a different kind of immortality, achieved by different means. No magic acorns or slumbering under trees. He sold his soul on the dotted line, joined an exclusive members’ club. Eternal life. But not eternal

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