“ We have a house, a sublet for the summer, that overlooks the world, up in the Berkeley hills; it’s owned by people, Scandinavians… who must have some money, because it’s all the way up there, and it’s all windows and lights and decks, and up there we see everything, … all red rooftops and trees and cauliflower and columbine, shaped like rockets and explosions, all those people below us, with humbler views; we see … the blue above, the gleaming white Land of the Lost/Superman’s North Pole Gateway magic crystals that are San Francisco… and at night the whole fucking area is a thousand airstrips… so many blimps this summer- and stars, not too many visible, with the cities and all, but still some, a hundred maybe, enough, how many do you need, after all?”

51

“I find my car and drive across town, all the passing headlights glaring, mocking- that was probably bad, what I just do to Jenna; a therapist would say that was bad- up Ninth, across Market, up Franklin and down to cow hollow, where Therese lives. Down the hill and over a few blocks and her turreted third-floor apartment comes into view. Therese lives in the top floor of a huge light blue house on Gough, a few blocks from Union Street, in an apartment she decorated with her mother, complete with pot holders and curtains and about a hundred overstuffed pillows.”

139

“Then the footsteps started coming up the stairs, which they only did some of the time, the times when he was extraordinarily angry and our mother could not calm him down, and as they thumped up the stairs- why did he go so slow, so maddeningly slow? - I hung up the phone- I didn’t have time now- and devised a plan. I opened the window over my pillow, and then tore the sheet off my bed. The footsteps stopped thumping, meaning he was on the second floor, were just six or seven steps from my door… I twisted the sheet so it look like a rope of however I had seen it look on TV and as I began to tie it around the bed frame there was the trying of the door, then suddenly my name so loud I jumped, then pounding and demands yelled, and if I could just get this thing tied in time… the thumping got louder and louder and then the sheet was tied, twice –over, I  yanked it to test its strength and it seemed okay- it only had to hold for a few second, just until I was far down enough to jump- and so I turned my body on my bed and stated to scoot back, reaching a leg out the window, feeling my bare foot against the coarse wood of the side of the house…and then the pounding stopped.”

232

“Work becomes ever more depressing, routine, improved only by the occasional near-death experience. To wit: It is any day at all when I am at my desk, working on a spread debunking raves, one in a long line of contrarian articles pointing out the falsity of most things the world believes in, holds dear. We have debunked a version of the Bible written for black kids. We have debunked the student loan program. We debunk the idea of college in general, and work in general, and marriage, and makeup, and the Grateful Dead- it is our job to point out all this artifice, everywhere, and the work is rewarding, bringing truth to an unsuspecting-”

304