Chapters (55)
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Cast of Characters
- Part One
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Part Two
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Thirty-eight
- Thirty-nine
- Forty
- Forty-one
- Forty-two
- Forty-three
- Forty-four
- Forty-five
- Forty-six
- A note on the Author
Sebastian seemed just as taken aback because, laying down his pencil, he folded his hands across his knees like a public schoolboy reprimanded and replied, “I can’t help you.”
“Thank you,” I said, “thank you,” and walked out of his office and back down the stairs, with what little grace I could muster, not complaining about the heat, although this time I actually felt it.
Cyrinda was still asleep when I put my key in the door. I glanced around the corner at the answering machine, willing the light to flash with someone, anyone who could help me. If it were a telephone company salesman living inside the red blink, I would have rung him back. But the only thing flashing was my heart, flicking silently on and off, jam-packed with hundreds of messages I didn’t want to hear and hadn’t bothered to listen to in months. If I could have had a better understanding of my own body, if I’d had the patience to figure out where my heart was plugged in, I would have yanked it right out of the socket.
But I remembered, of all the classes I never paid attention to in school, biology was the one I went out of my way to block completely. I mapped out my emotional fate then, when I decided that it was too frightening to try to understand how one’s own body functions. Because if you know how it works then it is not too hard to figure out how it can fail. And the best way to pretend you don’t know you’re failing is to pretend you don’t know you are competing. When people are vocally modest, you can tell they’re very frightened. For “What, me, little old me? No one is interested in little old me” delete and read “Why is nobody interested in little old me? Am I really so little? How do I get big? Wait, let me cover my ears, I don’t want to know.”
I told myself that if I went out tonight, and if I was recognized by a fan, I would ask them to help me, or try to. But then it struck me that people who ask for autographs are very rarely fans and very rarely interested in the celebrity they’re requesting a part of. Because they don’t really want anything to do with the individual. What the fan wants is celebrity the entity, the whole messy cloud, which hovers above New York City like a spaceship.
“Take me!” people plead to the ship. “Prod me! Probe me! Pick me, motherfuckers!”
But the spaceship just sits there.
