Chapters (60)
- Cover
- Title Page
- Personae
- I: Early Days
- One. Control
- Two. Doubt
- Three. Fate
- Four. Same
- Five. Fine Arts
- Six. In Loco Parentis
- Seven. Settling
- Eight. Neighbors
- Nine. Prospects
- Ten. The Lucky
- Eleven. Instruction
- Twelve. Same
- Thirteen. This Is a Pipe
- Fourteen. This Is Not a Pipe
- Fifteen. The Reason
- Sixteen. That Person
- Seventeen. Predictably
- II: Writing Teacher
- Eighteen. Early Poems
- Nineteen. Motivation
- Twenty. Allegory
- Twenty-One. Grief
- Twenty-Two. A Portrait
- Twenty-Three. Veils
- Twenty-Four. Soft Power
- Twenty-Five. Lists
- Twenty-Six. A Break
- Twenty-Seven. Elsewhere
- Twenty-Eight. Custom
- Twenty-Nine. Parity
- Thirty. Fortune
- III: Volta
- Thirty-One. Images
- Thirty-Two. A Very Interesting Young Man
- Thirty-Three. Letters
- Thirty-Four. We Prefer to See Ourselves Living
- Thirty-Five. Love
- Thirty-Six. The Iceberg
- IV: Your Best Reader
- Thirty-Seven. A Novelist
- Thirty-Eight. In Advance of the Broken Arm
- Thirty-Nine. Their Penultimate Encounter
- Forty. Détente
- Forty-One. Worlds
- Forty-Two. Recognition
- Forty-Three. Persistence
- Forty-Four. And Then
- Forty-Five. Mingling
- Forty-Six. You
- Forty-Seven. Persona
- Forty-Eight. Est et Non
- Forty-Nine. The Author
- Epilogue
- Afterword: The Libertine
- Acknowledgments
- About the Authors
It was low and intelligent. No, it was not precisely female. Not precisely. No. It could have been the voice of a girl, that was not impossible, but was it, really?
Alice held still.
Only if she didn’t_ _ _NO.
Only if was it the voice was it it it it it it it the one doing the talking. YOU REMEMBER. No, ? OHYes you do?\ SO fun pretending to ty[e oo shit, I mean TYPE when I use your SHIT.
It seemed to end.
Alice held her head. She dug her knuckles into her eyelids, scrubbed.
She was alone.
Sort of.
No, she was not alone. She could feel it waiting in the wings, as it were, there, ready to take a word from her, take it to say it again, back, back again, as you.
That was the thing, the words appeared, to hang, as, in, thin air
TIMES T1ME STIMETIM3SSSESS
Time withered. It exploded whitely across the sink
Alice swiped ineffectually at this lattice.
U LIKE ME NOW/? it wondered.
“I like you very much,” Alice whispered. “Tell me what you want.”
WHAT W4NT?
U KNOW
“No,” Alice said aloud. She tried to be conciliatory. “Or, just, not now. Later.”
TH+N WH=N
“When?”
W H EN
“S-soon,” Alice stuttered. “Soon, soon, soon.”
U PROMIS
“Yes,” Alice said. “Promise.”
When she was a little girl, Alice, or Ali, as she was at this time called, had learned she had a special gift. This gift was the ability to play with time.
The way the game went was like this: You had to choose a point and stare at it, and at a certain moment you had to think, I’ve got you, Time!
It was like catching an animal by its tail. Time pulled you through the loop, after.
And it only lasted a minute, because of the difficulty of holding on to time’s tail, but during the period during which you held on to time’s tail, nothing else could happen. This meant that nothing happened to you, and that nothing happened to anyone anywhere else in the world. And nothing happened. Nothing. Happened.
Time’s tail was burning hot. It was sharp as glass but never left a mark.
It was best if you chose something bright to stare at, something bright and very small, like the head of a screw or someone’s jewelry.
Ali sat on the driveway while her mother’s lawn mower was repaired by [. . .]