Chapter 7 Section 6
We put her in a quiet room with a case of her favorite flavored sparkling mineral water.This was Leni's room, with its resilvered mirrors and large-screen TV.
Not long ago, Jeff stopped wearing baggy shorts and a hat with a backward brim, and started reverting to his old look.His computer was equipped with multimedia capabilities to watch the famous video of a motorist being shot by a Texas highway killer.Intrigued by such images, Jeff devised routines using filtering techniques to remove background images and find missing information.He upped the quality of the video and played it in super slow mode, trying to find some kind of pixel in the data cluster in order to find clues and determine the identity of the photographer.
The 3.5-ounce device, which clips onto my sweatpants, shows distance I've run, calories burned, and even my stride.
I was eleven years old when he went out to buy cigarettes.It was a warm evening and there were people playing Pinocles in the game room down the street, and the sound of the radio wafted through the street.Back then, there was always someone with the radio on.They got him near Orchard Beach, where the shoreline was dotted with inlets.They threw him into the sea, and his body floated in the seaweed between the rocks on the shore, in the darkness of soft creatures.It's not that I really remember the weather that day, or the people who played cards.Back then, there was always someone with the radio on and someone always playing cards.
We hope that the garbage in our home is clearly classified, safe and harmless.We rinsed used bottles, put them in special bins, and painstakingly peeled the wax paper off cereal boxes.It's like cleaning the body of an Egyptian pharaoh for burial after death.We want to take care of the minutiae the right way.
He never writes numbers on paper. He has a super-strong head that memorizes numbers, which is a storage body specially for recording numbers.
We equipped her with an air humidifier, clothes racks, a good quality firm mattress, and Marianne's original dresser.That piece of furniture is very nice and has seen better days.
From my office in the bronze tower, with my ironed shirt on and gazing out at the brown hills in the distance, I feel grounded, safe, and connected to something more powerful.
In the bronze tower, another manager cleared his throat, and in the low hoarse voice I heard something drift past my ear, a secret left over from childhood, a game he had played in his own life .Maybe, it's 108 degrees Fahrenheit in the streets.He watches over himself.The third person monitors the first person, and "he" monitors "me". "He" knows things that "I" can't even imagine.Maybe, it's 110 degrees Fahrenheit, 112 degrees in the street, and the phone rings with composed phrases.The third person assigns his nobodies to assassinate the first person's important person.
I used to tell them when they were kids, and tell them over and over, that this is the dishwasher, this is the packaging, and this is the teapot spout.
In the Bronze Tower, we use the rhetoric of the hurt minority in order to prevent legal provisions that affect business.Our CEO, Arthur Blessing, believes that the real feeling comes from the street and the business knows it.We learn how to complain, how to use the language of the victim.Every morning in the car, Arthur listened to street rap on the radio about how to be crazy, how to get into bed, how to be fair—and to get what was rightfully his by violent means if necessary.He believes that this is the only way to appeal, otherwise it cannot affect the government.Once, Arthur recited the lyrics to me on a company plane, and we laughed like he did.The laughter was pronounced clearly, and the speech was slow and cadenced, as if it was composed of words.
When I get home, I like to slather on sunscreen, on my face and legs, and run along quiet streets lined with phlox and palms, and along the red clay banks of drainage channels.Even though my skin has turned olive and is comparable to my dad's, I feel protected up to 60 when I run in the harsh sun when it's hot.I keep this in mind: Once upon a time, 15 was the absolute maximum SPF scientifically proven to give, now it's up to 30, it's up to 60.I saw on the way that the trunks had been plastered to protect them from the unrelenting sun.
Bread has to be cut thick, that's how he handles it.That kind of bread was round and puff pastry, which he called Campobasso bread.Campobasso is the name of the bakery, which itself is the name of a small mountain town in Italy.Even the best bread, he said, was worthless if it was sliced thinly.I watched him shave his beard, watched him cut bread, grasped the bread with one hand, and put the thumb of the other hand—the hand holding the knife—on the back of the knife, controlling the thickness of each slice, and cutting the pastry with one knife. Skin, into the fluffy center.
When Lainee gave birth to her child—her daughter—I felt a surge of tender joy in my heart.Or rather, it was a relief that some long-standing worry or fear disappeared, some ridicule of men disappeared.All the women of the house were assembled by the hearth, including the mother in the pale green room, and the baby who had just darted to the ground wriggling its legs in the restlessness of death.Thank goodness it was a girl.I felt very happy, and some kind of knot deep in my body was slowly untied.I saw her lying in her mother's arms, naked, bathed in brilliant light.
We only deal with plastic on Tuesdays, with the exception of bottle and box lids. Waste is an interesting word whose origins can be traced back to Old English, Old Norse, and finally Latin, and its derivatives include nothingness, void, disappearance, and destruction.
Residents of Phoenix are known as Phoenix People.
Even though I told her about the stolen car, I didn't talk about the problems they were talking about.We—Marian and I—talked.We said that if someone saw our son commit a crime, there were only two things they could describe: one was the color of his skin, and the other was the derisive sticker he had plastered on the rear bumper of his Honda.Provided, of course, that his Honda was an element of the crime scene.The sticker was given to him by someone else, and it said: Driving fast doesn't work.
Marianne and I see the glamorous goods on the shelves and think about the garbage they make before we buy them.We didn't ask what kind of casserole that thing would turn into?What we're asking is, what kind of garbage will that thing make?Is it safe, clean and easy to handle?Can its packaging be recycled, turned into a dark paper bag that is difficult to mouth-seal?We think about the garbage formed by commodities first, and then we look at whether it is food, light bulbs, or anti-dandruff shampoo.What kind of waste does it form, we ask?We ask, if the packaging of a food is going to be around for a million years, is it responsible to eat that?
Following folk custom, he never put numbers on paper.
Night after night, the two of us—my mother and I—sat in the dim light, watching reruns of “Honeymoon.”Ralph Crampton was tormented with unstoppable pain and wept daily.Perhaps, the role that the mother identifies with is Alice.The character wears an apron and cotton clothes and lives in a poorly furnished apartment with the smell of food in the hallways.However, Alice's husband is a bus driver and often stays at home, unwilling to go out.The car he drives is socially licensed.Ralph and Alice have no children, so don't worry, save yourself a lot of torment.Some children have no father.The body didn't even emerge from the seaweed between the rocks on the coast, it was floating on the surface and was found by two people on a Sunday morning.They were in a rented rowboat with a cage used to catch crabs.Jamie Costanza's body was bitten and bruised, and his age could not be determined.
I returned to the coastal lowlands of Texas, wearing a hard-shell helmet with a miner's lamp, standing on a 2,000-foot salt channel to speak to a BBC reporter.The producer stood off-camera asking questions, and with a mouth full of salty dust from the forklift, I tried to find an answer that would satisfy her.
Someone is doing work that is not licensed by society.Late at night, I heard footsteps in the aisles and alleys, and wondered if Jamie was back?He came back from the dead world, from the dark world, maybe from New Jersey.Just after dawn, I hurriedly got up, put on my clothes, and the heating pipes made a burst of noise.The Italians in shrouds were celebrating early morning mass.The nerves of the kids are on edge, making it seem like these little guys are harder to deal with than coffee grounds.They go to mass in the cold morning.The older son, sometimes depressed, sometimes with outright anger, kept his distance and climbed to the roof to smoke in the freezing rain at night.
I looked at the Lucky Strike logo and thought of the target.
I saw men in moon suits burying drums of nuclear waste, and I thought of living rocks deep underground, of nuclear reactions going on underground, of half-life, of atoms with half their nuclei decaying.The most common isotope of uranium is bombarded with neutrons, producing plutonium that is capable of fission—if we can generate the verb fission from the energy of splitting atoms.The proton number of this isotope is 238.Adding these numbers together yields 13.
However, those bombs that were produced were not dropped.I recalled that we were standing in the low reinforced concrete building and heard Clara Sachs mention those soldiers who flew strategic bombers.The missile is still on the rotary launcher, the operator is back, and the intended target city has not been destroyed.