I couldn't understand; cheating was the one thing I'd told her all those years ago would be unforgivable. She knew, she said, but that was part of what had been confusing her, that I would even have told her that, as if she weren't an actual human being with the freedom to act, but some character in a scenario in my head. There was a quality I had of making the people closest to me feel lonely, somehow. Some essential cold withholding at the core of myself.

One day, he and William had been speeding toward each other; the next, careening away. But why?

As if it were possible for one person to care about another and still treat him or her like this.

But what if time worked the other way around?What if what his adolescent self had felt then was the ghost of his present one, sitting here on a sagging bench, beckoning him into his future?

And didn't time always slow, anyway, the closer you came to what you wanted?

But no, what interested him, psychologically speaking, was the sense of continuity itself, the mind's insistence that this was the same Regan he'd known when he was eight; had anything befallen her, the Regan he lost would have been the one who'd perched on the black rocks of the park back then, with all her futures inside.

There is no such thing as a perfect phrase, or a private language, and . . . time only runs the one way.

Some people think the real them is whoever they are when they're not around other people.

It's like Charlie's dreamed everything he lived through here.

Everything's always changing, Charlie. We become who we are. The mask melts into the face.

Three’s all you need to change the world. Look at the Bolsheviks, or the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

And as he reached for William's leg, the way a small child will reach for its mother's, there welled up through a small hole in the bottom of Mercer's soul a relief surpassing any he'd ever known in waking life.

William, an artist is someone who combines a desperate need to be understood with the fiercest love of privacy-

No amount of art, even of the Great American variety, can elevate you above, or insulate you from, the divisions, the cataclysms, of ordinary life.

Reading it was like subletting a small apartment in someone else's head.

For paranoia was Zig's late style: How else but through networks and conspiracies could he fashion a target big enough for his outrage? Richard usually found paranoia uninteresting, insofar as it swept away the incidental, which was the real grist of history.

The sky was low and broody, but from here, near the treeline, you could see the forest rolling down into the valley, the lake tucked away like a pocket mirror.

Punk had picked the locks, sluiced out into the grid.

William loathed his family,' Mercer said. 'With cause.

As ever in the family Goodman, someone would have to swallow feelings here, and it was easier that it be Mercer.

And she learned that you couldn’t stockpile anything that mattered, really. Feelings, people, songs, sex, fireworks: they existed only in time, and when it was over, so were they.

Incidental, all of it, of course, but this was what this city bestowed that novels couldn't: not what you needed in order to live, but what made the living worth doing in the first place.

In the wasteland of metro Boston, at thirteen, fourteen, his big dream had been of a gun to his own head, putting him out of his misery—a misery that by sophomore year of college was indistinguishable from everybody else's.

You couldn’t trust people to be tomorrow what they had been yesterday.

No need to look to see if your former home has vanished yet into the humdrum gray behind you; you'll be able to feel it, the sudden eclipse of the tractor beam the house puts out. Of its forcefield of sadness.

Darkness just loosens the mask. Sharpens the mind's eye. Makes the color of a remembered pencil, or a tick of waxy red on a cracked plaster wall, as vivid as that taillight a few feet away.

No, what one wanted, really, was the city or anyone in it to see how one suffered. Of course, this being New York, they'd likely just tell him Get over it . . . Was it possible that the last month had been a kind of judgement on him for ever daring to pretend that anything meant anything at all?

It's like we've been living in two different cities. You up here in all this marbled comfort, and me down there, killing myself in slow motion.

Failure is so much more interesting.

It’s a lesson some writers take a lifetime to learn: what makes us care about things is other people caring, too.

You assumed whatever was vivid to yourself was vivid to others, and vice versa, but she was going to make him spell it out, for the first time in either of their lives.

When he lifted his head, the sun seemed impossibly close. Science-fictionally close.

What he had remembered was to tuck among his changes of clothes one of Regan's framed photographs of the four of them from a few summers back, at Lake Winnipesaukee. He set it up on the nightstand, as if he might swim down into the past, where nothing could go wrong.

Was she Minh Thuy, finally, or was she Jenny? But the time when there had been a meaningful difference between the two would come to seem like a tiny neighborhood where you couldn't decide which house was yours. Which felt important when you were high above, you thought, in the foothills, but not so much at the truer remove of a continent, where the lives you'd lived and the places you'd come from, dwindled to a single point on the horizon, in the incorrigibly distant past.

Whatever he's feeling at a given moment is what he's always been and always will be feeling.

And why love things you were destined to lose? Why let yourself feel things if the feelings were doomed to die?

Truly unconditional love was suffocating, in that it took so little notice of who you actually were.

Because if every moment of a life is present in every other, so is every old self you've ever tried to outrun. And then how to know—the present self having always felt flimsy, somehow, compared to the one so acutely alive under the kitchen table—which you, specifically, is the real one?

So he'll keep dragging himself up this bridge between possible worlds, this rickety ruin of light, trying to imagine it might matter if he makes it to the other side.

The absence of a skyline makes him doubt he'll ever get where he's going, and behind him, where he's come from might as well not be there.

Charlie tried to focus on what she was saying, but his head felt packed with gauze. Like no one could reach him in here, where it hurt.

Who didn’t exist at the convergence of a thousand thousand stories?

That it may be the only thing the darkness makes clearer: who really matters is whoever you're most desperate to see.

What galled him most was the presumption of these writer types, as if there weren’t actual people in the world, with jobs to do, appointments to keep, wives to appease, but only so much material.

And so there was a fundamental scepticism about the ability of any institution, even one like the novel, to tell us anything true.

When he went to go get groceries, though, he asked Mercer to come. 'There's no one I'd rather get stuck in a snowdrift and freeze to death with,' William said.

And so she remained, like everything that mattered to me then, secret—to be pursued in the woods by moonlight, when I was supposed to be studying.

The reason we can say anything we want in America is that we know it makes no difference.

America isn’t that far from totalitarianism.

I keep having this fantasy about some wide river or channel I'm on the bank of. I can look up, and on the far side is another, better self, holding hands with Mercer—that's his name, my ex—and both of them are watching me flail over here, watching me from the life I'm supposed to have had. When did it become impossible to get there from here? When did that bridge get burned?

An actual artist, living right under her nose.

HOW TO MAKE A REVOLUTIONARY CONSCIOUSNESS IS: educate yourself. On the train, for example, read the same two pages of Das Kapital over and over, willing them to make sense.

I looked at her, exhausted in the hospital bed, and she looked at you, and you looked at me looking at her with eyes that had never known anything else, and for a moment there I swear we saw each other with a clarity that nothing can alter, not time, not heartbreak, not death.

There was this hot, yellowy stillness the air always got in the minutes before the last bell, as if it were stiffening itself to be shattered.

I didn't drink, I told him, with that embarrassed feeling I got whenever I was reminded that I had a body, that I looked like anything at all.

A funny thing happened post-diagnosis. They put him on drugs, things went up and down, but he lived. He lived. It was like a waiting room where they kept not calling your name.

Her eyes were glistening, but for some reason he couldn't reach out and touch her. It was like some gestures were so simple they were beyond him.

In a blacked-out house, stripped of all comforts, it's easy to turn your anger outward, to attack this city he's lying at the center of, with its filth and its pollution and its oppression, but really, New York is the only thing that's never abandoned him.

And you out there: Aren’t you somehow right here with me?

Famous revolutionary,' you say, and the laughter pumps out of your chest like blood, great almost painful spurts of it splashing up the building faces toward the marquee moon.

There were two options—call the foul or don't—and either way, he would lose, but there was a thrill here in this moment when actual combat might have replaced the shadowboxing he'd been doing for months now with every last person he loved.

He wanted to flee in shame, to the kitchenette, to the next room, to the fire escapes and rooftops and the places where the city ended.

Even the kids, behind the slice of streetscape floating in the glass, had mastered the art of pretending not to see.

He was a priest now, pagan, half-naked in the night, performing obscure rites of interment. Or he was the lead player in his own novel, or in one of those new arcade games William loved, compelled to repeat some totemic motion until he got it right. Only once did he feel, as he had on New Year's Eve, that someone was standing among the trees, watching. Well, let him watch, damn it. Something was being enacted here, as if it had been this deeper mission calling Mercer home all along. And now that he'd completed it, maybe he would be allowed to advance through to the next level, to a world where no one got shot.

Despite which, Charlie seems doomed to stumble around in the dark, clutching pieces of a puzzle he still can't see.

Actual artists are like mythological creatures,' she heard herself opine. 'You hear about them, but a sighting's pretty rare.

Good artists are always crazy, one way or another.

All these threads, like the ley-lines he'd read about in his Time-Life history books, converging on the Cicciaro girl, who lay there unaware, a glass-coffined beauty whose kingdom was in ruins.

The second this interminable wait ended, it would all start to fall away into the past, to become unreal.

Even before the letter he'd been divided: one part of him swanning with Jay Gatsby around an imaginary Gotham; the other part stolid and earthbound, nose to the deep fryer, in the stifling, sizzling South.

There's nothing in this courtyard, after all, that wasn't here in 1977; maybe it's not this year but that one, and everything that follows is still to come ... For if the evidence points to anything, it's that there is no one unitary City. Or if there is, it's the sum of thousands of variations, all jockeying for the same spot. This may be wishful thinking; still, I can't help imagining that the points of contact between this place and my own lost city healed incompletely, left the scars I'm feeling for when I send my head up the fire escapes and toward the blue square of freedom beyond. And you out there: Aren't you somehow right here with me? I mean, who doesn't still dream of a world other than this one? Who among us--if it means letting go of the insanity, the mystery, the totally useless beauty of the million once-possible New Yorks--is ready even now to give up hope?

This isn’t Soviet Russia. This is America we’re talking about. For God’s sake, this is New York City.

Did you really think I'd steer you wrong?" Then William pointed to the wide-open country beyond the next ridge. "New York's that way. My compass is unerring.

How could anarchy be any worse for the general welfare than this? I say let the city go bankrupt, the buildings fall, let grass take over Fifth Avenue. Let birds nest in storefronts, whales swim up the Hudson. We can spend mornings hunting for food, and afternoons fornicating, and at night we’ll dance on the rooftops and chant shantih shantih at the sky.

You're hung up on something that's never going to love you back.

College stirred in her a certain contempt for virtues like kindness and persistence. She would have appeared to have been a kind and persistent person herself, but a steady diet of Antonioni films and an introductory course on existentialism had awakened her to the fact that she wanted more.

No one, in the end, made it out of this life alive.