Wave of Mutilation

Breaking the fourth wall meant that Christian could move as the crow would fly. He could get back to Samantha and that strand of the plot by following a straight line.

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.

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

Holding onto an idea of her identity, even though the idea is a fiction, is what she’s aiming at.

the voice on the other end of the line wasn’t my father at all, but was the voice of a narrator. He was calm, assured, and from another era…probably the fifties or sixties. This was a voice from nature documentaries or educational films made by Disney, and he wasn’t addressing me directly but was speaking to Donald Duck.

Unreality, the disappearance of a center, meant that I had a destiny.

Samantha and then stopped to examine my wife’s reflection in the window on the right side of the plane. I could see the lights from the airport, the red and green dots along the runway, on the other side of my wife’s transparent profile. Samantha was a spectral presence on the surface of the window and to see the world outside I had to look through

“Everything is in flux. Everything is equal, but if you ask people what they think or how they feel they say they’re just as stuck as they were before.”

Not everyone was a transvestite, but nobody was who he or she normally was. Everything was switched around, and somebody rolled out barrels of ice cream.