Extraits

He kisses her, thinks, Go on, ruin me. Wreck me, please. She kisses him back and she does.

You wouldn't make love with him, you'd make art.

When you learn a new word, you suddenly see it everywhere. The mind comforts itself by believing this to be coincidence but isn’t—it’s ignorance falling away. Your future self will always see what your present self is blind to. This is the problem with mortality, which is in fact a problem of time.

I could study you for a lifetime, carrying all your peculiarities and discretions in the webs of my spidery palms, and still feel empty-handed

She is in all of his spaces and all of his thoughts. He contemplates formulas and degrees of rationality and they all turn into her. He thinks about time, which has only recently begun, or at least now feels different. He thinks: the Babylonians were wrong; time is made of her.

Whatever you are made of, Charlotte Regan, I am made of it, too.

Can you love my brain even when it is small? When it is malevolent? When it is violent? Can you love it even when it does not love me?

“And how are your moods?” the doctor had asked.

The thing about pills, Regan wanted to say to the doctor who had clearly never taken any, was that the ups and downs still happened; they were just different now, contained within brackets of limitation. Some inner lawlessness was still there, screeching for a higher high and clawing for a lower low, but ultimately the pills were loose restraints, a method of numbly shrinking.

Every time a pill sat in Regan’s palm she suffered some new strangulation; a faint memory of some distant need to force her heart to race. She’d crave a senseless rage, a dried-up sob, a psychotic joy, but find only pulse after pulse of nothing.

Without the volatility of her extremes, what was she?

“Managed,” she’d said.

Someday, Regan will tell Aldo: It’s very human what you do, and at first, he’ll think, No, not true, because bees.

But then eventually he’ll understand. Because until that night, Aldo had been comfortable with nothing, but he would eventually learn because of her: It isn’t constancy that keeps us alive, it’s the progression we use to move us.

Because everything is always the same until, very suddenly, it isn’t.

Did it matter where it started, and would it matter where it would end? Either yes, it mattered very much, because everything was a consequence of something and therefore what became of them was somehow predetermined, or no, it did not matter at all, because beginnings and endings were not as important as the moments that could have happened or the outcomes that might have been. Either it was everything to know the whole story, to look back and see the shape of it while standing along its periphery; or it was nothing, because things in their entirety were less fragile and therefore less beautiful than the pieces within the frame.