Sublime

He remembered how, during the pregnancy, she’d always been warm as a furnace, even in the winter. No matter how cool they kept the bedroom, she’d kick off the sheets. He thought it had been her. He thought that had been him. But maybe it was someone else’s memory. Someone from the Preiss or one of the other ships. It was so hard to be sure.

THE JAPANESE HAD already forgotten more neurosurgery than the Chinese had ever known. The black clinics of Chiba were the cutting edge, whole bodies of technique supplanted monthly, and still they couldn’t repair the damage he’d suffered in that Memphis hotel.

What one’s imagination makes of other people is dictated, of course, by the laws of one’s own personality and it is one of the ironies of black-white relations that, by means of what the white man imagines the black man to be, the black man is enabled to know who the white man is.

Here was the backward story: the present and its tedium receding, all those doctor visits, the endless pills, the strange man shining lights in her eyes, the television programs she could never follow, the daughter watching her, rising each time Adele lifted out of her chair, any time Adele tried to go anywhere. She found herself in the strangest p

At the Dinky Donut, outside town, Bob Pardee sat quietly as the family ate and talked. The soft pink golfer’s face had begun to droop from his skull. His flesh seemed generally to sag, giving him the hang-dog look of someone under strict orders to lose weight. His hair was expensively cut and layered, a certain amount of color combed in, a certain