Mike Lange Quotes

Imperial is like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker with the attitude of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, if Robert Caro had been raised in an abandoned grain silo by a band of feral raccoons, and if Mike Davis were the communications director of a heavily armed libertarian survivalist cult, and if the two of them had somehow managed to stitch John McPhee’s cortex onto the brain of a Gila monster, which they then sent to the Mexican border to conduct ten years of immersive research, and also if they wrote the entire manuscript on dried banana leaves with a toucan beak dipped in hobo blood, and then the book was line-edited during a 36-hour peyote séance by the ghosts of John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Sinclair Lewis, with 200 pages of endnotes faxed over by Henry David Thoreau’s great-great-great-great grandson from a concrete bunker under a toxic pond behind a maquiladora, and if at the last minute Herman Melville threw up all over the manuscript, rendering it illegible, so it had to be re-created from memory by a community-theater actor doing his best impression of Jack Kerouac. With photographs by Dorothea Lange. (Viking has my full blessing to use that as a blurb.)

I take one step and my heel catches on a cobble. I barely manage to stop myself before I face plant. Oh God. These shoes! What if it’s the shoes? That’s exactly what happened before. Maybe I could buy a new pair of shoes and wear them, and maybe that would fix everything. I turn around and look up and down the walk. It’s not like I’ll find a Prada shop. But they obviously make shoes somewhere, right? I stalk past several stores, peering in the windows. Someone makes shoes. They have to. “Rebecca?” Emily’s voice calls after me as I pass another shop. The shoes will fix everything. I’ll put on some of those weird slipper-style things and once I walk out of the shop, I’ll be back in London. The Prada heels are just cursed or something. I pass another store. This one has little teacups in the window. This is ridiculous. Don’t girls like shoes here? Oh. Wait. Even if I find a shoe store, how am I supposed to pay for the shoes? Maybe I don’t need the shoes, per se. Maybe I just need to take these stupid ones off. I unbuckle the straps over my foot, pick up the heel, and fling one shoe down the walkway. Liberated, I pull the other heel off and fling it down with its mate. Now what? Should I fall over? On purpose? That’s how it worked before. I had to knock my head on the sidewalk. I eye the big cobbles beneath my bare toes. They look so hard. What if I have a real concussion? Last year, Mike Lange, star quarterback, had to sit out two games because he had a concussion. We lost both games because of it, but supposedly if he got another one within a couple weeks of the first, his brain could swell and he’d get brain damage. Which doesn’t really sound that fun. Emily clears her throat. I chew on my lip and look down the walkway at my shoes. What am I, crazy? I just flung four-hundred-dollar pumps down the street.