Yet torture is above all an art, an artistic discipline just like literature , cinema, or contemporary dance. All detained in the City-State ghettos bitterly missed the torturers of yesteryears, those monsters who worked with the precision of a Swiss watch-maker.

Jazz is the only lever used by all the riffraff of Tram 83 to switch social class as one would subway cars.

Poverty is hereditary just like power, stupidity, and haemorrhoids.

When Malingeau drew himself from his long sleep, the music was still droning in his head. Christelle was already gone. She had taken care to scribble a line on a scrap of paper."I drank your body until my thirst was worn.

You share the same destiny as everyone else, the same history, the same hardship, the same rot, the same Tram beer, the same dog kebabs, the same narrative as soon as you come into the world. You start out baby-chick or slim-jim or child-soldier. You graduate to endlessly striking student or desperado. If you've got a family on the trains, then you work on the trains; otherwise like a ship you wash up on the edge of hope - a suicidal, a carjacker, a digger with dirty teeth, a mechanic, a street sleeper, a commission agent, an errand boy employed by for-profit tourists, a hawker of secondhand coffins. Your fate is already sealed like that of the locomotives carrying spoiled merchandise and the dying.

He hiccupped and continued: "I write therefore I come...But unfortunately, my orgies are never eternal!...