two of them, he and Jonas accrete new citizens, they joke, like a ball of tar.
They are different. They are slanty-eyed and dark-skinned. Their names are different. They are Ching Ji and Sinhal and Lhotsu and Thierry, the French kid they mostly just put up with because he pays for everything. They are Trevor from Zimbabwe, or from London, where he added a cockney twang to his southern African dialect of hollowed vowels and soft consonants (speaking, they tease him, like Nelson Mandela would speak if he found work as a chimney sweep). They are James, from Montana, who is someone’s roommate and who, as he is frequently reminded, is kept around as the token Yankee, a trapping of respectability, to be traded or sold at any convenient moment. They are interestingly garbed, avant-garde,and nerdy. They listen to diverse music: electronica and funk, jazz and reggae. One of them may be royalty.
They are known everywhere, whether they are welcomed at chic lounges by bartenders who are eager to add a touch of ethnicity to their ambience, or they are the dark kids in the corner, most likely engineering students, who talk funny. Or maybe they are something in between, something more like their classmates, like everyone of a certain age: on their own, confident and self-absorbed and accomplished and immature and cruel and generous and smart and unconcerned and cavalier and sensitive and ambitious, and, and, and.
41
This sticks in my mind.
They tell us to put on our gas masks. They file us into a low, cinder-block hut. They make us stand against the walls. The sergeant enters and closes the door behind him. In the middle of the room is a low, wrought-iron table, and on top of it sits a silver cylinder, like a thermos. Its edges are brown with liquid stains, like coffee. The sergeant twists off the top of the cylinder and drops in several white pellets, releasing a thin haze. Then we are all ordered to take off our masks. None of us wants to do it. But he is yelling at us, telling us we will be court-martialed if we don’t.
My eyes tear up as soon as I take off the mask, and I gag on the smoke entering my lungs. We all start coughing up thick gobs of mucus, and our skin burns like it’s under a heat lamp. Ipanic, nearly dropping the mask. I think I can see the silhouettes of people burned onto the walls. Just when I think I am going to black out, he tells us to put our masks back on. My skin still burns, but with the mask on, at least I can see clearly and breathe. After a minute, we are ordered to take off our masks again. This time we do it quickly, knowing that the faster we get them off, the faster we will be allowed to get them back on. This done, we file quickly out of the building and fall into a retching mass on the cool grass outside.
42
He soon finds that, except to those in the middle of it, being in love is the most boring thing, the most incomprehensible thing in the world.
They dine at a secluded corner table on a red-and-white paper tablecloth, upon which the food before them either loses all meaning or becomes their entire existence. Her hands fly around as she talks, seeming to push the words through the air in front of her, and he hangs from them like a strand of overcooked fettuccini.
She tells him that, were the earth the size of an apple, the surface would be as smooth as its skin. This bit of trivia feels vitally important to him, as though it says something fundamental about their lives. He finds it amusing when she tries to show him the correct way to hold a fork. He tells her that if you hold your hand at arm’s length out to the night sky, an areaof the night equivalent to the space of your thumbnail would contain a million stars, most of which cannot even be seen by the naked eye. By which he means that present between them are infinite possibilities.
And they are only dimly aware that, to an outside observer, someone lacking their interest or enthusiasm or imagination, they are talking a kind of silly
They are different. They are slanty-eyed and dark-skinned. Their names are different. They are Ching Ji and Sinhal and Lhotsu and Thierry, the French kid they mostly just put up with because he pays for everything. They are Trevor from Zimbabwe, or from London, where he added a cockney twang to his southern African dialect of hollowed vowels and soft consonants (speaking, they tease him, like Nelson Mandela would speak if he found work as a chimney sweep). They are James, from Montana, who is someone’s roommate and who, as he is frequently reminded, is kept around as the token Yankee, a trapping of respectability, to be traded or sold at any convenient moment. They are interestingly garbed, avant-garde,and nerdy. They listen to diverse music: electronica and funk, jazz and reggae. One of them may be royalty.
They are known everywhere, whether they are welcomed at chic lounges by bartenders who are eager to add a touch of ethnicity to their ambience, or they are the dark kids in the corner, most likely engineering students, who talk funny. Or maybe they are something in between, something more like their classmates, like everyone of a certain age: on their own, confident and self-absorbed and accomplished and immature and cruel and generous and smart and unconcerned and cavalier and sensitive and ambitious, and, and, and.
41
This sticks in my mind.
They tell us to put on our gas masks. They file us into a low, cinder-block hut. They make us stand against the walls. The sergeant enters and closes the door behind him. In the middle of the room is a low, wrought-iron table, and on top of it sits a silver cylinder, like a thermos. Its edges are brown with liquid stains, like coffee. The sergeant twists off the top of the cylinder and drops in several white pellets, releasing a thin haze. Then we are all ordered to take off our masks. None of us wants to do it. But he is yelling at us, telling us we will be court-martialed if we don’t.
My eyes tear up as soon as I take off the mask, and I gag on the smoke entering my lungs. We all start coughing up thick gobs of mucus, and our skin burns like it’s under a heat lamp. Ipanic, nearly dropping the mask. I think I can see the silhouettes of people burned onto the walls. Just when I think I am going to black out, he tells us to put our masks back on. My skin still burns, but with the mask on, at least I can see clearly and breathe. After a minute, we are ordered to take off our masks again. This time we do it quickly, knowing that the faster we get them off, the faster we will be allowed to get them back on. This done, we file quickly out of the building and fall into a retching mass on the cool grass outside.
42
He soon finds that, except to those in the middle of it, being in love is the most boring thing, the most incomprehensible thing in the world.
They dine at a secluded corner table on a red-and-white paper tablecloth, upon which the food before them either loses all meaning or becomes their entire existence. Her hands fly around as she talks, seeming to push the words through the air in front of her, and he hangs from them like a strand of overcooked fettuccini.
She tells him that, were the earth the size of an apple, the surface would be as smooth as its skin. This bit of trivia feels vitally important to him, as though it says something fundamental about their lives. He finds it amusing when she tries to show him the correct way to hold a fork. He tells her that if you hold your hand at arm’s length out to the night sky, an areaof the night equivalent to the space of your thumbnail would contain a million stars, most of which cannot even be seen by the naked eye. By which he means that present between them are infinite possibilities.
And they are only dimly aware that, to an outside observer, someone lacking their interest or enthusiasm or imagination, they are talking a kind of silly
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