When he lifted his head, the sun seemed impossibly close. Science-fictionally close.

Even the beauty of the landscape was an abstraction, like the beauty of a man in an advertisement for a cologne you could not smell.

Detonations crash in from nearby like walls she's a void at the center of.

There was this hot, yellowy stillness the air always got in the minutes before the last bell, as if it were stiffening itself to be shattered.

When she awakened in the a.m. into blind-slit shrinking nowhereness, it had all gone disorientingly quiet, and she would imagine for a few seconds she was back there in that mausoleum of a ranch house in the San Fernando Valley.

For a moment, he thought he sensed, beneath the visible world, some blind infrastructure connecting the two of them, or the three of them, and connecting them to still others. People he hadn't even met.