During the 1980s, in California, a large number of Cambodian women went to their doctors with the same complaint: they could not see. The women were all war refugees. 

Ryan spent an entire afternoon at the medical school searching for what his inventory sheet described as a “stereotaxic with dog-monkey adapters.” 

Dawn in a forest. Pale light in the sky. Woods indistinct. Rustling of leaves, sound of soft, wooden whistles. On a sort of bluff or ledge of stone elevated above the rest there is seen a cloud of smoke drifting up into the sky or trees. 

It was midsummer, the heat rippling above the macadam roads. Cicadas screaming out of the trees and the sky like pewter, glaring.

The days were the same day, like the shallow mud-brown river moving always in the same direction but so slow you couldn’t see it. 

Early Saturday afternoon the man who had introduced himself as Oliver took Ginny to several shops on Madison Avenue above 70th Street to buy her what he called an appropriate outfit. For an hour and forty-five minutes she modelled clothes, watching with critical interest her image in the three-way mirrors, unable to decide if this was one of her really good days or only a mediocre day. 

Hypothesized: X follows me continually, whenever I go out, for one of several reasons that are mutually exclusive. He is on a mission of reclamation, a private detective hired by my father; he is a police agent; he is an acquaintance in disguise or an acquaintance of someone I know/have known, who wants revenge for a real/unreal offense I have committed.

I wasn’t born ugly. I’ve seen snapshots of myself as a baby, as a toddler. Beautiful little girl with springy dark curls, shining dark eyes, a happy smile.

My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his umbrella. Véra licked his stamps for him.

Oneba tells of an occasion which found him riding the trench, pedaling himself, in his fabulous little pedalcar. As he went along, so the story goes, he was set upon by a band oftrochilics, their

Ajegunle Joe spent the evening reading the letters from the few subscribers he had left. Without a single exception they called him a fraud and demanded back their money.