Brown Haze Quotes

Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze. Hair: brown. Lips: scarlet. Age: five thousand three hundred days. Profession: none, or "starlet" Where are you hiding, Dolores Haze? Why are you hiding, darling? (I Talk in a daze, I walk in a maze I cannot get out, said the starling). Where are you riding, Dolores Haze? What make is the magic carpet? Is a Cream Cougar the present craze? And where are you parked, my car pet? Who is your hero, Dolores Haze? Still one of those blue-capped star-men? Oh the balmy days and the palmy bays, And the cars, and the bars, my Carmen! Oh Dolores, that juke-box hurts! Are you still dancin', darlin'? (Both in worn levis, both in torn T-shirts, And I, in my corner, snarlin'). Happy, happy is gnarled McFate Touring the States with a child wife, Plowing his Molly in every State Among the protected wild life. My Dolly, my folly! Her eyes were vair, And never closed when I kissed her. Know an old perfume called Soliel Vert? Are you from Paris, mister? L'autre soir un air froid d'opera m'alita; Son fele -- bien fol est qui s'y fie! Il neige, le decor s'ecroule, Lolita! Lolita, qu'ai-je fait de ta vie? Dying, dying, Lolita Haze, Of hate and remorse, I'm dying. And again my hairy fist I raise, And again I hear you crying. Officer, officer, there they go-- In the rain, where that lighted store is! And her socks are white, and I love her so, And her name is Haze, Dolores. Officer, officer, there they are-- Dolores Haze and her lover! Whip out your gun and follow that car. Now tumble out and take cover. Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze. Her dream-gray gaze never flinches. Ninety pounds is all she weighs With a height of sixty inches. My car is limping, Dolores Haze, And the last long lap is the hardest, And I shall be dumped where the weed decays, And the rest is rust and stardust.

He is my favorite smell, my favorite sound, my favorite sight. He will never know how much I love him because he does not remember the day Darrow and I conceived him, or the months I carried him inside me, or the minute he came into the world, the moment he said his first word or took his first step, or made me laugh for the first time. I remember all those things, and all the things about them. Where the sun lay in the sky, how his father’s eyes sparkled, what I feared in those moments, what I hoped for his life to be. That season of life is a haze to him, but when I die and reflect on my life, I know I will still believe that season was the meaning of mine.

Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze. Hair: brown. Lips: scarlet Age: five thousand three hundred days.

By all the rules of modern fiction there should have been gunsmoke mingling its acrid blue with the brown haze of corral dust. Dead men should have fallen and been trampled... Nothing of this sort happened.

Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze. Hair: brown. Lips: scarlet. Age: five thousand three hundred days. Profession: none, or "starlet". Where are you hiding, Dolores Haze? Why are you hiding, darling? (I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze, I cannot get out, said the starling).

The thick, stagnant air reeked of perfume, cigarettes, and exhaust. Everyone was barefaced, wanting to flaunt their features instead of hiding beneath blank masks. To be able to flirt with their lips, to be able to kiss. But I wasn’t fooled by the dark—the air was still poisonous. Even if we couldn’t see the brown haze, it smothered our city lit in neon.

Most beautiful of all was the tarnished gold of the elms, with a little brown in it, a little bronze, a little blue, even-- a blue like amethyst, which made them melt into the azure haze with a kind of happiness, a harmony of mood that filled the air with content.

Here's the plain truth, at least as it has been shown to me: We are never far from wonders. I remember when my son was about two, we were walking in the woods one November morning. We were along a ridge, looking down at a forest in the valley below, where a cold haze seemed to hug the forest floor. I kept trying to get my oblivious two-year-old to appreciate the landscape. At one point, I picked him up and pointed out toward the horizon and said, "Look at that, Henry, just look at it!" And he said, "Weaf!" I said, "What?" And again he said, "Weaf," and then reached out and grabbed a single brown oak leaf from the little tree next to us. I wanted to explain to him that you can see a brown oak leaf anywhere in the eastern United States in November, that nothing in the forest was less interesting. But after watching him look at it, I began to look as well, and I soon realized it wasn't just a brown leaf. Its veins spidered out red and orange and yellow in a pattern too complex for my brain to synthesize, and the more I looked at that leaf with Henry, the more I was compelled into an aesthetic contemplation I neither understood nor desired, face-to-face with something commensurate to my capacity for wonder. Marveling at the perfection of that leaf, I was reminded that aesthetic beauty is as much about how and whether you look as what you see. From the quark to the supernova, the wonders do not cease. It is our attentiveness that is in short supply, our ability and willingness to do the work that awe requires.

Below us stretched a landscape only slightly more hospitable than Mars. (I mean the planet, not the god, though I suppose neither is much of a host.) Sun-blasted ochre mountains ringed a valley patchworked with unnaturally green golf courses, dusty barren flats and sprawling neighbourhoods of white stucco walls, red-tiled roofs and blue swimming pools. Lining the streets, rows of listless palm trees stuck up like raggedy seams. Asphalt parking lots shimmered in the heat. A brown haze hung in the air, filling the valley like watery gravy. ‘Palm Springs,

Late August" Late August — This is the plum season, the nights blue and distended, the moon hazed, this is the season of peaches with their lush lobed bulbs that glow in the dusk, apples that drop and rot sweetly, their brown skins veined as glands No more the shrill voices that cried Need Need from the cold pond, bladed and urgent as new grass Now it is the crickets that say Ripe Ripe slurred in the darkness, while the plums dripping on the lawn outside our window, burst with a sound like thick syrup muffled and slow The air is still warm, flesh moves over flesh, there is no hurry

Summer came whirling out of the night and stuck fast. One morning late in November everybody got up at Cloudstreet and saw the white heat washing in through the windows. The wild oats and buffalo grass were brown and crisp. The sky was the color of kerosene. The air was thin and volatile. Smoke rolled along the tracks as men began to burn off on the embankment. Birds cut singing down to a few necessary phrases, and beneath them in the streets, the tar began to bubble. The city was full of Yank soldiers; the trams were crammed to standing with them. The river sucked up the sky and went flat and glittery right down the middle of the place and people went to it in boats and britches and barebacked. Where the river met the sea, the beaches ran north and south, white and broad as highways in a dream, and men and babies stood in the surf while gulls hung in the haze above, casting shadows on the immodest backs of the oilslicked women.

At home I walked through a haze of belongings that knew, at least vaguely, who they belonged to. Grampar’s chair resented anyone else sitting on it as much as he did himself. Gramma’s shirts and jumpers adjusted themselves to hide her missing breast. My mother’s shoes positively vibrated with consciousness. Our toys looked out for us. There was a potato knife in the kitchen that Gramma couldn’t use. It was an ordinary enough brown-handled thing, but she’d cut herself with it once, and ever after it wanted more of her blood. If I rummaged through the kitchen drawer, I could feel it brooding. After she died, that faded. Then there were the coffee spoons, rarely used, tiny, a wedding present. They were made of silver, and they knew themselves superior to everything else and special. None of these things did anything. The coffee spoons didn’t stir the coffee without being held or anything. They didn’t have conversations with the sugar tongs about who was the most cherished. I suppose what they really did was physiological. They confirmed the past, they connected everything, they were threads in a tapestry.

I don’t wish to be unfair to Southern California. When the place was not on fire, or trapped in a brown haze of smog, or rumbling with earthquakes, or sliding into the sea, or choked with traffic, there were things I liked about it: the music scene, the palm trees, the beaches, the nice days, the pretty people. Yet I understood why Hades had located the main entrance to the Underworld here. Los Angeles was a magnet for human aspiration - the perfect place for mortals to gather, starry-eyed with dreams of fame, then fail, die, and circle down the drain, flushed into oblivion.

It was one of those great iron afternoons in London: the yellow sun being teased apart by a thoasand chimneys breathing, fawning upward without shame. This smoke is more than the day’s breath, more than dark strength--it is an imperial presence that lives and moves. People were crossing the streets and squares, going everywhere. Busses were grinding off, hundreds of them, down the long concrete viaducts, smeared with years’ pitiless use and no pleasure, into haze-gray, grease black, red lead and pale aluminum, between scrap heaps that towered high as blocks of flats, down side-shoving curves into roads clogged with Army convoys, other tall busses and canvas lorries, bicycles and cars, hitching now and then, over it all the enormous gas ruin of the sun among the smokestacks, the barrage balloons, power lines and chimneys brown as aging indoor wood, brown growing deeper, approaching black through an instant-- perhaps the true turn of the sunset-- that is wine to you, wine and comfort. The Moment was 6:43:16 British Double Summer Time: the sky beaten like Death’s drum, still humming, and Slothrop’s cock--say what? yes lookit inside his GI undershorts here’s a sneaky hardon stirring, ready to jump-- well great God where’d that come from? There is in his history, and likely, God help him, in his dossier, a peculiar sensitivity to what is revealed in the sky. (But a harden?)

The plane turned onto the runway, amid noisy billows of dry brown air, and it accelerated slowly, complacently, as if fully aware the mysteries of flight had been worked out long ago, and it lifted off calmly, and glinted in the sun, and sideslipped in the haze, and curved upward on trails of soot, setting a dark but graceful course north and east.

O'Shaughnessy is hitting Denholt on the side of his head with his free arm, great, walloping, pile-driver blows. The two of them stagger together, like partners in a crazy dance. Glass is breaking all around them. Gray smoke from the six shots, pink-and-white dust from the chipped brick-and-plaster walls, swirl around them in a rainbow haze. Something vividly green flares up from one of the overturned retorts, goes right out again. O'Shaughnessy tears the emptied gun away, flings it off somewhere. More breaking glass, and this time a tart pungent smell that makes the nostrils sting. The crunch of pulverized tube glass underfoot makes it sound as if they were scuffling in sand or hard-packed snow. ("Jane Brown's Body")

The big girl has ordered me something called a Venusian Fury. It’s dark as its namesake, Atalantia au Grimmus, and tastes like licorice and salt. Something in it makes the back of my eyes buzz and my groin swell. “What do you think?” she asks hopefully. “Tastes like the ass end of the Ash Lord.” I push it away. She looks downcast at the table. In my haze, pity is slow to come, and dull when it does. I hate bars like this. “You know what the Ash Lord’s ass tastes like?” Cyra asks. “Look how old he is,” Dano says, taking a break from staring at a beautiful slip of a Pink at the bar, who looks nervously at his nasal piercings. His head is buzzed in popular fashion with Obsidian dragons. “Tinpot’s been around long enough to try everything.

Science uses the Red Shift to measure deep cosmic distances. But how to measure deep historic time? How about—the Saffron Shift. If history itself had a color, it is . . . like wood or bark, or living forest floor. Assigning hues to time periods, the sum total of history is saffron-brown—but the chromatic arc starts from blinding white (prehistory) to sun-yellow (Ancient Greece), then deepening to pale wood tones (Dark Ages) and finally exploding like an infinite chord into a full brown palette that includes mahoganies, siennas (Middle Ages), oak, sandalwood (the Renaissance), cherry, maple (Age of Reason), and near-black old woods (Industrial Revolution) for which there may not be names. As time approaches our own, the wood-brown palette fades to a weird glassy colorlessness, goes black-and-white for a brief span as you think of photographs of your grandparents, and then again fades until we get a clear medium that is the color of the world. And the present moment is perfectly transparent. It's only as you start looking into the future, that the colors start returning. The glass is turning silvery with a murky haze, and there is blue somewhere in the distance . . .

The pace of this modern age is not conducive to maintaining one’s consciousness. Glued to our electronics, we are blind and deaf to the world around us. Run down by our long work days, we are too exhausted to think and too hurried to feel. The day ends in a haze of strained thoughts, numbness, and fatigue. And we rise the next morning only to start the cycle again. In this age of distraction, if you desire to fritter away your life with empty diversions, there is an abundance of gadgets available to aid you. Quietness is a characteristic of ages gone by. Our generation is the one it died with. Connected to the virtual world, we ignore the presence of those in our home. One can only hope we will awaken to the need for balance before we look up from the screen to find our loved ones have gone, and our life has passed us by.

Joe had never flown in an airplane, never seen a city from any higher vantage point than that afforded by his own six-foot-three frame. Now, standing on the observation deck, he looked out at the many spires of New York rising through a pall of smoke and steam and heat haze and did not know whether he found it beautiful or frightening. He leaned over the low stone parapet and peered down at miniature cars and buses and swarms of tiny people scurrying along the streets. The city below him, Joe realized, murmured. The cacophony of honking horns and wailing sirens and rumbling streetcars that had as**saulted his ears at street level were reduced up here to something gentler and more soothing, like the sonorous breathing of an enormous living thing. It was a much bigger, more connected, world than he had ever thought possible.

I was still walking behind Mrs. Haze through the dining room when, beyond it, there came a sudden burst of greenery – “the piazza," sang out my leader, and then, without the least warning, a blue sea-wave swelled under my heart and, from a mat in a pool of sun, half-naked, kneeling, turning about on her knees, there was my Riviera love peering at me over dark glasses. It was the same child-the same frail, honey-hued shoulders, the same silky supple bare back, the same chestnut head of hair. A polka-dotted black kerchief tied around her chest hid from my aging ape eyes, but not from the gaze of young memory, the juvenile breasts I had fondled one immortal day. And, as if I were the fairy-tale nurse of some little princess (lost, kidnapped, discovered in gypsy rags through which her nakedness smiled at the king and his hounds), I recognized the tiny dark-brown mole on her side. With awe and delight (the king crying for joy, the trumpets blaring, the nurse drunk) I saw again her lovely indrawn abdomen where my southbound mouth had briefly paused; and those puerile hips on which I had kissed the crenulated imprint left by the band of her shorts – that last mad immortal day behind the "Roches Roses." The twenty-five years I had lived since then, tapered to a palpitating point, and vanished.

The narrow bed with its purple, red, and green quilt, the bedside table with its jar of rocks, piled books. The porcelain basin near the window where she washed her face, the pitcher with the brown rose painted on it, the large crack like a vein in the bottom of the basin. The apricot orchard, the buzzing bees like a haze in spring. The barn—the smell of hay and manure, grease, old leather. The sun streaming through the slats. The mule’s nose in her palm.

He's prowling back and forth like a lion with distemper now. There's a shiny streak down one side of his face. "I shouldn't have let her go ahead - I ought to be hung! Something's gone wrong. I can't stand this any more!" he says with a choked sound. "I'm starting now -" "But how are you -" "Spring for it and fire as I go if they try to stop me." And then as he barges out, the fat lady waddling solicitously after him, "Stay there; take it if she calls - tell her I'm on the way-" He plunges straight at the street-door from all the way back in the hall, like a fullback headed for a touchdown. That's the best way. Gun bedded in his pocket, but hand gripping it ready to let fly through lining and all. He slaps the door out of his way without slowing and skitters out along the building, head and shoulders defensively lowered. It *was* the taxi, you bet. No sound from it, at least not at this distance, just a thin bluish haze slowly spreading out around it that might be gas-fumes if its engine were turning; and at his end a long row of un-colored spurts - of dust and stone-splinters - following him along the wall of the flat he's tearing away from. Each succeeding one a half yard too far behind him, smacking into where he was a second ago. And they never catch up. ("Jane Brown's Body")

For the next nine months, Sylvia would report on campus trends, politics, tastes, style. It was an honor, but it was grueling. Sylvia was overworked. She had boyfriend problems. She longed for Europe. She broke her leg in a skiing accident. Her best friend, Marcia Brown, had gotten engaged and moved off campus - other girls were away on their junior year abroad. The whole campus seemed mired in some bleak haze- there were suicide attempts, abortions, disappearances, and hasty marriages. Sylvia coped with shopping binges in downtown Northhampton- sheer blouses, French pumps, red cashmere sweaters, white skirts, and tight black pullovers - clothes more suited to voguish amusements than studying. Everyone wanted to be one of Mademoiselle's guest editors, but Sylvia needed it - some shot of glamour to pull her out of the mud.

My eye keeps escaping towards the big blue lacquered door that I've had painted in a trompe-l'oeil on the back wall. I would like to call Mrs. Cohen back and tell her there's no problem for her son's bar mitzvah, everything's ready: I would like to go through that door and disappear into the garden my mind's eye has painted behind it. The grass there is soft and sweet, there are bulrushes bowing along the banks of a river. I put lime trees in it, hornbeams, weeping elms, blossoming cherries and liquidambars. I plant it with ancient roses, daffodils, dahlias with their melancholy heavy heads, and flowerbeds of forget-me-nots. Pimpernels, armed with all the courage peculiar to such tiny entities, follow the twists and turns between the stones of a rockery. Triumphant artichokes raise their astonished arrows towards the sky. Apple trees and lilacs blossom at the same time as hellebores and winter magnolias. My garden knows no seasons. It is both hot and cool. Frost goes hand in hand with a shimmering heat haze. The leaves fall and grow again. row and fall again. Wisteria climbs voraciously over tumbledown walls and ancient porches leading to a boxwood alley with a poignant fragrance. The heady smell of fruit hangs in the air. Huge peaches, chubby-cheeked apricots, jewel-like cherries, redcurrants, raspberries, spanking red tomatoes and bristly cardoons feast on sunlight and water, because between the sunbeams it rains in rainbow-colored droplets. At the very end, beyond a painted wooden fence, is a woodland path strewn with brown leaves, protected from the heat of the skies by a wide parasol of foliage fluttering in the breeze. You can't see the end of it, just keep walking, and breathe.

An hour after they’d left the clearing, a heavy layer of fog filled the valley like a moist blanket. The trees grew into amorphous shapes, mountains gone. Ash stopped dead in his tracks. He stared into the forest with wide eyes. “Whoa! D’you see that?!” Vale jerked to a stop. “What? Where?!” “There in the trees.” He pointed into the forest to where the rainy undergrowth grew thick with a hazy veil of grey-white mist. “The haze.” “What about it?” “Looks like game lag. But like… real lag. Real life lag.” Ash grinned at her, his brown eyes sparkling. “Like the forest is supposed to be there, but it’s not totally loaded by the computer yet.” “That’s going to be trouble.” “Why?” Vale nodded to where Ash knew the mountaintops should be, but were no longer visible, caught in an otherworldly lag. “It means we can’t see the mountains.” “So?” “So we can’t see where we are going anymore.” Ash frowned. “Er… yeah.” “C’mon. Let’s keep walking.

Still on the subject of eating, we don’t have our own plates, or our own knives and forks or cups. Like most of what we use, they’re communal, they’re handed out at random. There’s no chance for anything to become imbued, to come alive through fondness. Nothing here is aware, no chair, no cup. Nobody can get fond of anything. At home I walked through a haze of belongings that knew, at least vaguely, who they belonged to. Grampar’s chair resented anyone else sitting on it as much as he did himself. Gramma’s shirts and jumpers adjusted themselves to hide her missing breast. My mother’s shoes positively vibrated with consciousness. Our toys looked out for us. There was a potato knife in the kitchen that Gramma couldn’t use. It was an ordinary enough brown-handled thing, but she’d cut herself with it once, and ever after it wanted more of her blood. If I rummaged through the kitchen drawer, I could feel it brooding. After she died, that faded. Then there were the coffee spoons, rarely used, tiny, a wedding present. They were made of silver, and they knew themselves superior to everything else and special.

Ell's Double Down --- "The haze across the room conceals the faces of the patrons and gives the setting a secretive draping. Her heart is pounding and although she has done this for months now, she still becomes nervous starting out. She glances across the table, the man facing her is attractive he is dressed in a fine suit his eyes a warm brown, his stare deliberate. When he looks at her she can tell, it’s a look you don’t give a kid sister, his look is heated. She can hardly breathe when she looks into his eyes it is disarming, she can’t have this. She looks above him to her friend Sophie; she is unsure of herself and silently communicates her discomfort to her friend. Sophie gives her a smile then leans down whispering into the man’s ear his attention is suddenly diverted giving Ell the opportunity to settle in. She exhales feeling better now that the man is distracted. Later she will help Sophie untangle herself from him but now she has to focus on the business at hand. She takes a deep breath, flashing a dazzling smile at the rest of the men gathered around the table and antes up. The truth is gambling makes her feel empowered the rush was like none other. Each hand dealt promised her a solution to her problems. Logically that alone could be the cause for her increased heart rate and butterflies but Ell knew better. She liked the mind games played as each of them attempted to psyche out opponents seated around the table. Ell herself suffered through painful lessons until she honed her own skills. Eventually Sophie taught her the most valuable ploy --using her womanly wiles as her weapon. Ell initially felt foolish but the first time she glanced through mascaraed lashes and saw the effect she turned to her friend for additional suggestions. This combined with her ability to gauge the cards each player held or what now laid in the muck. However to be honest, she simply loved soundly beating the table full of men.

For a moment, the fog remained unmoved. It sat around, swirling in place, very clearly listening but showing no sign of offering answers. Then, just as Nausicaä began to contemplate conjuring a few more fireballs, the fog began to thin. Little by little it drained from the air until, finally, all that was left was a vaguely damp, translucent haze. She could only stare at what was revealed. “Huh,” she breathed when speech at last overcame her surprise. “This is…new.” It wasn’t just the changelings that had gathered. They were present, of course—one mere step away. Nausicaä briefly took in the unmistakable pale green tint of his fawn-brown skin and the snaking twists of ivy that grew from the sharp flares of his little shoulders. But there were others. There were so many others. In all of Nausicaä’s very long life, she had never encountered so many of magic’s children in one place. The crowd of them stretched far in almost every direction, faces of all shapes and sizes peeking out of the foliage and trees. There were centaurs, goblins, brownies, imps and sprites. There were redcaps, with their crimson-stained hats and vicious scythes, which glinted in the moonlight. There were kelpies dripping sodden weeds, lilies strangled in their manes. Littered throughout the branches above were crows that weren’t really crows at all, but sluagh—wandering souls of the violent dead who preyed on those soon to die. There were larger things too. Unnameable things. Things that had undoubtedly been calling this forest their home long before Nausicaä had ever been born. She narrowed her eyes at the distance—something massive as a mobile hill stood still as silence too far away for mortal eyes to see. Their form was not unlike an overlarge, poisonous tree frog, all vibrant blues and yellows and greens, a crown of velvet antlers on their head and hundreds of glittering black eyes on their face. A freaking Forest Guardian, she would hazard a guess, not that she’d ever seen one to say for sure. “Uh…okay, well, weird time to have a company meeting, but you do you, I guess. I’m going to…go. Gar, maybe it’s best you stick with these guys until I square things up with my Reaper. Thanks for lifting the fog, forest brats! Good luck with…whatever this is. May the force be with you.” She turned back around. There weren’t any faeries in front of her, either—just trees and misty gloom and a darkness unnatural even for this time of night. And, of course, the glass-chime tinkling of magic, which now sounded to her a bit distressed.

There was one door down this hall that she had to reach—one room where she’d be safe. She kept her hand on the stone wall, counting the doors she passed. So close. Her cloak caught on the handle of a door as she passed by and ripped away. But she made it to that door, to the room where she’d be safe. Her fingers didn’t quite feel the grain of the wood as she pushed against the door and swayed on the threshold. Bright light, a blur of wood and stone and paper … and through the haze, a face she knew, gaping at her from behind a desk. A choked noise came out of her throat, and she looked down at herself long enough to see the blood covering her white dress, her arms, her hands. In the blood, she could see Davis, and the open gash across his throat. “Chaol,” she moaned, seeking that familiar face again. But he was already running, smashing through his office. He bellowed her name as her knees buckled and she fell. She saw only the golden brown of his eyes and held on long enough to whisper, “Gloriella,” before everything tilted and went black.

His mouth curved in the beginning of a sudden smile. "Know something, Juliet?" "What?" "I was terribly angry with you, but now that I think about it, it's all rather funny." "Funny?" "Yes; I mean, here we are, married and having our first row about money. My brother probably has half of England out looking for us. I'll wager he's gone to de Montforte House, Burleigh Place, and all of the Den members' homes in search of us, and where are we? Holed up in the most exclusive bawdy house in London!"  His eyes crinkled with sudden amusement. "Oh, what an adventure we're having!" She shook her head, pitying him for not seeing the seriousness of a situation she saw as grave. "I still don't think it's funny, Gareth." "Don't you?" "No." "Well —" he folded his arms, jauntily, defiantly — "I do." The teasing light was back in his eyes, his chin dimpling beneath its haze of golden-brown stubble, and despite herself, Juliet couldn't help her own reluctant little smile. Just

That season of life is a haze to him, but when I die and reflect on my life, I know I will still believe that season was the meaning of mine.

Except that it was not fog but a body forming before her eyes out of a stream reflecting golden sunlight, a yellow checkered tablecloth, and the bones of two hundred goldfinches. Donkey forgot how to breathe. She opened the door wider and in doing so somehow flipped the contents of the hot pan onto the porch planks. Now the figure was fully conjured, tipping back in the chair, as Donkey was forbidden to do. There was Rose Thorn with her bare brown feet resting on the table, legs crossed at her slender ankles, her hands clasped behind her head, shiny hair as windblown as feathers. All around her, in the mid-morning haze, golden light fingered upward. Rosie was as perfect as a perfect number with all her factors adding up to make the sum of her, and the whole day felt fresh and breezy.

A month had passed since Roz left the island. According to her calculations, she had traveled hundreds of miles, but she still had hundreds more to go. The tireless robot continued north, on and on, toward the waters where the Ancient Shark roamed. If you travel far enough north, you’ll reach an area where the sun never sets in summer. And Roz had traveled far enough north. Up at the surface, there was constant daylight, all day, every day, until autumn. However, our robot was at a depth below the reach of the sun. And yet there were occasional glimmers. Certain deep-sea fish had glowing fins, while others had glowing teeth, and still others had spindly glowing lures that dangled from their heads. Jellyfish came in every shape imaginable, and many of them gave off a ghostly light. Most gleaming creatures kept their distance. Roz would see a flicker, and as her headlights swept toward it, the creature vanished into the murky haze. She was marching down a long slope that descended to the deepest trenches of the ocean when she felt her Survival Instincts tingling. The weight of all the water above was becoming too great. If she went much deeper, she’d be crushed from the pressure. So Roz stopped marching downhill and started swimming at a safer depth, and the ocean floor quickly faded from view. The robot’s limbs paddled automatically, which left her mind free to wander. Specks of debris floated all around, like a gentle snowfall, and suddenly she was recalling the snowfalls she’d experienced on land. She thought

THE WEBSITE FOR SSA Marine says, “Accelerating the Pace of Business.” Its terminal is now giving off a deafening whir: engine sounds, horns, beeps, and the echoes of workers shouting. The giant cranes lift containers off the ship, sliding them inward fast enough that they swing a little bit in midair. Currently, the bay is full of the haze-lightened silhouettes of container ships, players in that sprawling, fractal network whose workings have recently come to the fore in headlines about the supply chain. In the restored marsh along the park, clusters of migrating shorebirds are keeping their own schedule. It’s currently three hours from high tide, and on the shrinking islands, tiny sandpipers sit together so densely that they look like a tessellated pattern. Stalking around them are a variety of spidery birds, including long-billed curlews, which have surreal curved beaks more than half the length of their entire bodies. They are back for the time being, having traveled northeast to breed—possibly as far as Idaho—and in the meantime, they adjust their activities to the tides. On the one hand, it is true that you can see multiple forms of time here. The containers pile up; the shorebirds probe the mud; the phoebe chases its flies; a small, brown mushroom pushes up from the grass; and the tide continues to rise. Your stomach rumbles. But one of these clocks is not like the others. In order to maintain its equilibrium, it has to run ahead faster and faster.

In Yakutia, where the earth’s largest thermokarst—the “Batagai Depression”—a kilometer in length, 100 meters deep and still growing rapidly, is also the site for scientists who are gathering samples of preserved and frozen soils up to 200,000 years old. Using molecular genetic and microbiological procedures they hope to extract bacteria and viruses from the soils that could lead to new antibiotics. But for the third straight year terrible fires are devouring the forests of Yakutia. The smoke drifts out into the Pacific and people on ships and in Alaska and along the North American west coast cough and gasp in the pungent brown haze.

Good. That’s good. I’ll rest, and then I’ll be better. I toppled to the side. It’s cold, but it’ll ... get ... better. “Catalina.” A voice seeped through the haze. It was deep. Urgent. My lips were cool and felt detached from my body, so I didn’t answer. “Fuck.” That voice again. Then, something warm fell on my forehead. “Jesus, fuck. Catalina.” I messed up. I ... knew. I had done something wrong, and I wanted to admit it out loud to whoever was there, but all I accomplished was a mumble that didn’t really sound like ... anything. “Hey.” That voice softened, no longer sounding angry. And I ... I was so tired. “Open those big brown eyes.