This is my happy ending for you, and it’s my confession as well. There is no story. There is no world but just a few words. You are free to go.

“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.”

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 architect

The anchorman’s awkward smile, the way he would pause and raise his manicured left hand to his chin, this was how a television personality maintained the illusion of continuity. The story he was telling was one of systemic failure but what was communicated through these routine gestures was the exact opposite. Yes, ballot boxes had gone missing, ch

He was being read, the world itself was a kind of act, and knowing this gave him the power to stand outside the text.

“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.

It was at that moment, when her mouth became a spotlight, that I remembered what would happen next. That is, I remembered that Samantha had always been hollow.

I’d been part of a collective effort to organize an event that would lead us to understand how each one of us had been part of such an effort.

“I think I probably don’t exist,” Samantha told me. Was she like the motel, a fantasy that could only persist by declaring its unreality, or was she what she appeared to be? And if she was a projection, just my fantasy, then why was she telling me?