Swift birthing, my unsolving, Stranger...make me, new.

"It was remarkable how often he talked to her about these things. The Agency was the one subject in his life that could never be exhausted. Central Intelligence.  Beryl saw it as the best organized church in the Christian world, a mission to collect and store everything that everyone has ever said and then reduce it to a microdot and call it God. She needed to live in small dusty rooms, layered safely in, out of the reach of dizzying things, of heat and light and strange spaces, and Larry needed the great sheltering nave of the Agency. He believed that nothing can be finally known that involves human motive and need. There is always another level, another secret, a way in which the heart breeds a deception so mysterious and complex it can only be taken for a deeper kind of truth.

There were anemones in a bud vase on the table. The phone rang and Beryl went to her desk in the living room to answer" (Libra, Don Delillo, 260).

YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS The Green Island [Two paragraphs before Chapter 13]: "Still he said nothing. He seemed hardly aware of her except as a presence, a body giving him some small unwitting resistance, his will was dominant, all-obliterating. Enid understood that he was detached from her and from the rather anguished mechanical act he had performed, even as he stood swaying drunken against her, his arm crooked around her neck locking her in place, his hot shamed face in her hair, still he was somehow separate from her, saying her name, her name, so sweet so sweet --he swallowed a belch and Enid smelled beer.

Her eyes were open, staring. She was staring sightless as the sky darkened by degrees, the clotted clouds thickening, ridged with black. Now she could hear the lake again, dull spent waves, at dusk most days the wind died down and the lake became flat, merely rippling, shivering in motion. From somewhere up the beach came the sound of voices, gay drunken voices, waves of laughter so faint and chancy they might have been distant music. Now Felix had taken her hand, he was closing her stiffened fingers over his penis to stroke him hard again" (110).

"But all ex-dreamers are mildly irritated by the naiveté (sometimes, indeed, the irritating earnestness) of those who have been able, for one reason or another, to keep something of youth's idealism alive in their chosen work."

"She welcomed every breath of knowledge that came her way, all the better for its element of disquiet, but this time the foreboding shook her strongly. She sensed something out there in the Wall, a muddled shuffling danger that waited for the girl on her lithe passage through car bodies and discarded human limbs and acres of uncollected garbage.

Mother of Mercy pray for us. Three hundred days" (251).