Sublime

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

Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.

Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know.

I felt empty: no furniture, no curtains, no rugs. Just an empty container.

The people in the reefer would probably not have hung out together in the living world. The elderly black man with a myocardial infarction, the middle-aged white mother with ovarian cancer, the young Hispanic man who had been shot just a few blocks from the crematory. Death had brought them all here for a kind of United Nations summit, a roundtable

Doug spent even more time writing faxes to his two grown kids—Angie, nineteen, and Jaime, twenty-seven—whom he’d raised as a single father.