“What does Malcolm have to worry about?" JB would ask them when Malcolm was anxious about something, but he knew: he was worried because to be alive was to worry. Life was scary; it was unknowable. Even Malcolm's money wouldn't immunize him completely. Life would happen to him, and he would have to try to answer it, just like the rest of them. They all--Malcolm with his houses, Willem with his girlfriends, JB with his paints, he with his razors--sought comfort, something that was theirs alone, something to hold off the terrifying largeness, the impossibility, of the world, of the relentlessness of its minutes, its hours, its days.”

“What does Malcolm have to worry about?" JB would ask them when Malcolm was anxious about something, but he knew: he was worried because to be alive was to worry. Life was scary; it was unknowable. Even Malcolm's money wouldn't immunize him completely. Life would happen to him, and he would have to try to answer it, just like the rest of them. They all--Malcolm with his houses, Willem with his girlfriends, JB with his paints, he with his razors--sought comfort, something that was theirs alone, something to hold off the terrifying largeness, the impossibility, of the world, of the relentlessness of its minutes, its hours, its days.”

“. . .the particular way he had of structuring his paragraphs, beginning and ending each with a joke that wasn't really a joke, but an insult cloaked in a silken cape.”

“His persistent nostalgia depressed him, aged him, and yet he couldn't stop feeling that the most glorious years, the years when everything seemed drawn in florescents, were gone. Everyone had been so much more entertaining then. What had happened?”

“He will be someone who is defined, first and always, by what he is missing.”

“. . . breathing slowly and rubbing his palm against his chest as if to soothe his heart.”

“He has a vision of his life as a sliver of soap, worn and used and smoothed into a slender, blunt-edged arrow-head, a little more of it disintegrating with every day.”

“That morning he feels fresh-scrubbed and cleansed, as if he is being given yet another opportunity to live his life correctly.”

“He sits at the table and reads novels, old favorites of his, the words and plots and characters comforting and lived-in and unchanged.”

“In those hours he is awake and prowling through the building, he sometimes feels he is a demon who has disguised himself as a human, and only at night is it safe to shed the costume he must wear by daylight, and indulge his true nature.”

“Thank god he wasn't a writer, or he'd have nothing to write about.”

“He had never done it before, and so he had no real understanding of how slow, and sad, and difficult it was to end a friendship.”