Rectangle Wall Quotes

I need to leave something behind. Something that will stay. This room should be a historical landmark, the site of the beginning and end of Colby and Bev. Several minutes have passed, and I know that if I wait too long there will be a knock on the door and I'll have to go, but I need to leave a mark. It has to be significant enough to last, but subtle enough that the maid won't notice and wash it away. As I'm looking around I realize that I never noticed the print above the bed. It's another in the family series - a faded wedding portrait. Groom in tux. Bride with pearls. It comes off the wall easily.I set the print on the bedspread and wit eht dust on the wall with the sleeve of my hood. I take out a Sharpie from my bag. The wall has yellowed to create a perfect rectangle where the photograph must have been hanging, unremoved, for years. I fill the whiter space with this: I never got to tell you how beautiful you are. And then I return the frame to its place on the wall and go back out into the night.

Find a printer paper and imagine a full-grown bird shaped something like a football with legs standing on it. Imagine 33,000 of these rectangles in a grid. (Broilers are never in cages, and never on multiple levels.) Now enclose the grid with windowless walls and put a ceiling on top. Run in automated (drug-laced) feed, water, heating, and ventilation systems. This is a farm.

I walk past these white walls back to my room. The windows down the hallway shine their light and make rectangles on the floor. They angle themselves to the sun, so we never lose track of where the light comes in.

[Artemis] returned to the aft bay for Mulch's version of a briefing. The dwarf had drawn a crude diagram on a backlit wall panel. In fairness, there were more artistic chimpanzees. And less pungent ones. Mulch was using a carrot as a pointer, or more accurately, several carrots. Dwarfs liked carrots. 'This is Koboi Labs,' He mumbled around a mouthful of vegetable. 'That?' exclaimed Root. 'I realize, Julius, that it is not an accurate schematic.' The Commander exploded from his chair. 'An accurate schematic? It's a rectangle for heaven's sake!' Mulch was unperturbed. 'That's not important. This is the important bit.' 'That wobbly line?' 'It's a fissure,' pouted the dwarf. 'Anybody can see that.' 'Anybody in kindergarten maybe. So it's a fissure, so what?' 'This is the clever bit. Y'see that fissure is not usually there.' Root began strangling the air again. Something he was doing more and more lately.

And all of us with our closed eyes smelled the frangipani blossoms in the big rectangles of open wall, flowers so sweet they conjure up sin or heaven, depending on which way you are headed.

Stand here, he thought, and count the lighted windows of a city. You cannot do it. But behind each yellow rectangle that climbs, one over another, to the sky - under each bulb - down to there, see that spark over the river which is not a star? - there are people whom you will never see and who are your masters. At the supper tables, in the drawing rooms, in their beds and in their cellars, in their studies and in their bathrooms. Speeding in the subways under your feet. Crawling up in elevators through vertical cracks around you. Jolting past you in every bus. Your masters, Gail Wynand. There is a net - longer than the cables that coil through the walls of this city, larger than the mesh of pipes that carry water, gas and refuse - there is another hidden net around you; it is strapped to you, and the wires lead to every hand in the city. They jerked the wires and you moved. You were a ruler of men. You held a leash. A leash is only a rope with a noose at both ends.

The afternoon had passed to a ghostly gray. She was struck by the immensity of things, so much water and sky and forest, and after a time it occurred to her that she’d lived a life almost entirely indoors. Her memories were indoor memories, fixed by ceilings and plastered white walls. Her whole life had been locked to geometries: suburban rectangles, city squares. First the house she’d grown up in, then dorms and apartments. The open air had been nothing but a medium of transit, a place for rooms to exist.

At nights, one could stand in the courtyard and look up at a rectangle of night sky and survey the stars, but in the daytime the sun bathed the ivy growing on the walls and made the decorative tiles of the fountain glisten. Light, air, and water mixed together to produce a realm of enchantment.

I made a decision a long time ago that I was going to choose joy. I even painted a big rectangle on my wall and printed it in big letters so I wouldn’t forget to make that choice every day. The major word in that rectangle isn’t joy, it’s CHOOSE. It’s looking around me when life is difficult and trading every complaint I have for something beautiful in my life that far outweighs it. I know, it’s that Pollyanna personified thing again, but living joyful beats being cynical any day of the week.

We’d been walking in endless rectangles and now we were near the candy store again. The lights were out, the security gate down. We leaned up against the wall of a bank and I could feel the cool stone on my back, the billions of dollars thrumming through wires beneath and behind me, or on the night waves above. I wasn’t quite sure how they traveled. Or how much they got out anymore.

This is a painting that is at best one-third “I love religion so I’m gonna paint my favorite religious figures enjoying a meal” and at least two-thirds “Bro, my vanishing point is off the hook, seriously, check out my wall rectangles, you don’t even know.

forward to it, and Cooper, coatless and chilly in the desert evening, was thinking that the radio man was an asshole. He’d chased Vasquez for nine days now. Someone had warned the programmer just before Cooper got to the Boston walk-up, a brick rectangle where the only light had been a window onto an airshaft and the glowing red eyes of power indicators on computers and routers and surge protectors. The desk chair had been against the far wall as if someone had leaped out of it, and steam still rose from an abandoned bowl of ramen. Vasquez had run, and

I say is someone in there?’ The voice is the young post-New formalist from Pittsburgh who affects Continental and wears an ascot that won’t stay tight, with that hesitant knocking of when you know perfectly well someone’s in there, the bathroom door composed of thirty-six that’s three times a lengthwise twelve recessed two-bevelled squares in a warped rectangle of steam-softened wood, not quite white, the bottom outside corner right here raw wood and mangled from hitting the cabinets’ bottom drawer’s wicked metal knob, through the door and offset ‘Red’ and glowering actors and calendar and very crowded scene and pubic spirals of pale blue smoke from the elephant-colored rubble of ash and little blackened chunks in the foil funnel’s cone, the smoke’s baby-blanket blue that’s sent her sliding down along the wall past knotted washcloth, towel rack, blood-flower wallpaper and intricately grimed electrical outlet, the light sharp bitter tint of a heated sky’s blue that’s left her uprightly fetal with chin on knees in yet another North American bathroom, deveiled, too pretty for words, maybe the Prettiest Girl Of All Time (Prettiest G.O.A.T.), knees to chest, slew-footed by the radiant chill of the claw-footed tub’s porcelain, Molly’s had somebody lacquer the tub in blue, lacquer, she’s holding the bottle, recalling vividly its slogan for the past generation was The Choice of a Nude Generation, when she was of back-pocket height and prettier by far than any of the peach-colored titans they’d gazed up at, his hand in her lap her hand in the box and rooting down past candy for the Prize, more fun way too much fun inside her veil on the counter above her, the stuff in the funnel exhausted though it’s still smoking thinly, its graph reaching its highest spiked prick, peak, the arrow’s best descent, so good she can’t stand it and reaches out for the cold tub’s rim’s cold edge to pull herself up as the white- party-noise reaches, for her, the sort of stereophonic precipice of volume to teeter on just before the speaker’s blow, people barely twitching and conversations strettoing against a ghastly old pre-Carter thing saying ‘We’ve Only Just Begun,’ Joelle’s limbs have been removed to a distance where their acknowledgement of her commands seems like magic, both clogs simply gone, nowhere in sight, and socks oddly wet, pulls her face up to face the unclean medicine-cabinet mirror, twin roses of flame still hanging in the glass’s corner, hair of the flame she’s eaten now trailing like the legs of wasps through the air of the glass she uses to locate the de-faced veil and what’s inside it, loading up the cone again, the ashes from the last load make the world's best filter: this is a fact. Breathes in and out like a savvy diver… –and is knelt vomiting over the lip of the cool blue tub, gouges on the tub’s lip revealing sandy white gritty stuff below the lacquer and porcelain, vomiting muddy juice and blue smoke and dots of mercuric red into the claw-footed trough, and can hear again and seems to see, against the fire of her closed lids’ blood, bladed vessels aloft in the night to monitor flow, searchlit helicopters, fat fingers of blue light from one sky, searching.

Entropy is a bitch,” I said. “Now, now,” said Aenea from where she was leaning on the terrace wall. “Entropy can be our friend.” “When?” I said. She turned around so that she was leaning back on her elbows. The building behind her was a dark rectangle, serving to highlight the glow of her sunburned skin. “It wears down empires,” she said. “And does in despotisms.

Maxwell D. Kalist is a receiving teller at a city bank, Orwell and Finch, where he runs an efficient department of twenty two clerks and twelve junior clerks. He carries a leather-bound vade mecum everywhere with him – a handbook of the most widely contravened banking rules. He works humourlessly (on the surface of it) in a private, perfectly square office on the third floor of a restored grain exchange midway along the Eastern flank of Květniv’s busy, modern central plaza. Behind his oblong slate desk and black leather swivel chair is an intimidating, three-storey wall made almost entirely of bevelled, glare-reducing grey glass in art-deco style; one hundred and thirty six rectangles of gleam stacked together in a dangerously heavy collage.

Sudenly Garge spring up and walk to the wall to admire some modarn art hanging on Frank and Estele Catandas wall. Hes impressed. Frank and Estele have always had a traditienel sensibility when it come to aesthetic matter's. For as long as he knew it, this space on the wall was ocupied by a Normen Rockwell print of a smileing child with a cast on his arm eating a handful of bird seed out of the hand of the postman. But now its replace with this minimelist art work, a large black rectangle. He make out hes bald reflectien in the imposibly smooth black surfece. It look like something that should be hang in the Moma (Museum Of Modarn Art). "This is beauteful," Garge remark. "It seem like a stark comentary on the end of art. Who designe this?" "Not art," Frank go. "Thats a televisien.

Katz needed bootlaces, so we went to an outfitter’s, and while he was off in the footwear section I had an idle shuffle around. Pinned to a wall was a map showing the whole of the Appalachian Trail on its long march through fourteen states, but with the eastern seaboard rotated to give the AT the appearance of having a due north-south orientation, allowing the mapmaker to fit the trail into an orderly rectangle, about six inches wide and four feet high. I looked at it with a polite, almost proprietorial interest—it was the first time since leaving New Hampshire that I had considered the trail in its entirety—and then inclined closer, with bigger eyes and slightly parted lips. Of the four feet of trail map before me, reaching approximately from my knees to the top of my head, we had done the bottom two inches. I went and got Katz and brought him back with me, pulling on a pinch of shirtsleeve. “What?” he said. “What?” I showed him the map. “Yeah, what?” Katz didn’t like mysteries. “Look at the map, and then look at the part we’ve walked.” He looked, then looked again. I watched closely as the expression drained from his face. “Jesus,” he breathed at last. He turned to me, full of astonishment. “We’ve done nothing.” We went and got a cup of coffee and sat for some time in a kind of dumbfounded silence. All that we had experienced and done—all the effort and toil, the aches, the damp, the mountains, the horrible stodgy noodles, the blizzards, the dreary evenings with Mary Ellen, the endless, wearying, doggedly accumulated miles—all that came to two inches. My hair had grown more than that. One thing was obvious. We were never going to walk to Maine. In a way, it was liberating. If we couldn’t walk the whole trail, we also didn’t have to, which was a novel thought that grew more attractive the more we considered it. We had been released from our obligations. A whole dimension of drudgery—the tedious, mad, really quite pointless business of stepping over every inch of rocky ground between Georgia and Maine—had been removed. We could enjoy ourselves.

... we decided to create a Nothing Place in the living room, it seemed necessary, because there are times when one needs to disappear while in the living room, and sometimes one simply wants to disappear, we made this zone slightly larger so that one of us could lie down in it, it was a rule that you never would look at that rectangle of space, it didn't exist, and when you were in it, neither did you, for a while that was enough, but only for a while, we required more rules, on our second anniversary we marked off the entire guest room as a Nothing Place, it seemed like a good idea at the time, sometimes a small patch at the foot of the bed or a rectangle in the living room isn't enough privacy, the side of the door that faced the guest room was Nothing, the side that faced the hallway was Something, the knob that connected them was neither Something nor Nothing. The walls of the hallway were Nothing, even pictures need to disappear, especially pictures, but the hallway itself was Something, the bathtub was Nothing, the bathwater was Something, the hair on our bodies was Nothing, of course, but once it collected around the drain it was Something, we were trying to make our lives easier, trying, with all of our rules, to make life effortless. But a friction began to arise between Nothing and Something, in the morning the Nothing vase cast a Something shadow, like the memory of someone you've lost, what can you say about that, at night the Nothing light from the guest room spilled under the Nothing door and stained the Something hallway, there's nothing to say. It became difficult to navigate from Something to Something without accidentally walking through Nothing, and when Something—a key, a pen, a pocketwatch—was accidentally left in a Nothing Place, it never could be retrieved, that was an unspoken rule, like nearly all of our rules have been. There came a point, a year or two ago, when our apartment was more Nothing than Something, that in itself didn't have to be a problem, it could have been a good thing, it could have saved us. We got worse. I was sitting on the sofa in the second bedroom one afternoon, thinking and thinking and thinking, when I realized I was on a Something island. "How did I get here," I wondered, surrounded by Nothing, "and how can I get back?" The longer your mother and I lived together, the more we took each other's assumptions for granted, the less was said, the more misunderstood, I'd often remember having designated a space as Nothing when she was sure we had agreed that it was Something, our unspoken agreements led to disagreements, to suffering, I started to undress right in front of her, this was just a few months ago, and she said, "Thomas! What are you doing!" and I gestured, "I thought this was Nothing," covering myself with one of my daybooks, and she said, "It's Something!" We took the blueprint of our apartment from the hallway closet and taped it to the inside of the front door, with an orange and a green marker we separated Something from Nothing. "This is Something," we decided. "This is Nothing." "Something." "Something." "Nothing." "Something." "Nothing." "Nothing." "Nothing." Everything was forever fixed, there would be only peace and happiness, it wasn't until last night, our last night together, that the inevitable question finally arose, I told her, "Something," by covering her face with my hands and then lifting them like a marriage veil. "We must be." But I knew, in the most protected part of my heart, the truth.

The sun was low above Catalina, pushing bright yellow rectangles up my eastern wall when the door opened and Joe Pike walked in. I tipped what was maybe the second or third Modelo bottle at him. “Life in the fast lane,” I said. Maybe it was the fourth. “Uh-huh.

Leave me alone,” Win cried. “Go dust something!” “Win, if you don’t—” Amelia’s attention was diverted as she saw her sister’s gaze fly to the kitchen threshold. Merripen stood there, his broad shoulders filling the doorway. Although it was early morning, he was already dusty and perspiring, his shirt clinging to the powerful contours of his chest and waist. He wore an expression they knew well—the implacable one that meant you could move a mountain with a teaspoon sooner than change his mind about something. Approaching Win, he extended a broad hand in a wordless demand. They were both motionless. But even in their stubborn opposition, Amelia saw a singular connection, as if they were locked in an eternal stalemate from which neither wanted to break free. Win gave in with a helpless scowl. “I have nothing to do.” It was rare for her to sound so peevish. “I’m sick of sitting and reading and staring out the window. I want to be useful. I want…” Her voice trailed away as she saw Merripen’s stern face. “Fine, then. Take it!” She tossed the broom at him, and he caught it reflexively. “I’ll just find a corner somewhere and quietly go mad. I’ll—” “Come with me,” Merripen interrupted calmly. Setting the broom aside, he left the room. Win exchanged a perplexed glance with Amelia, her vehemence fading. “What is he doing?” “I have no idea.” The sisters followed him down a hallway to the dining room, which was spattered with rectangles of light from the tall multipaned windows that lined one wall. A scarred table ran down the center of the room, every available inch covered with dusty piles of china … towers of cups and saucers, plates of assorted sizes sandwiched together, bowls wrapped in tattered scraps of gray linen. There were at least three different patterns all jumbled together. “It needs to be sorted,” Merripen said, gently nudging Win toward the table. “Many pieces are chipped. They must be separated from the rest.” It was the perfect task for Win, enough to keep her busy but not so strenuous that it would exhaust her. Filled with gratitude, Amelia watched as her sister picked up a teacup and held it upside down. The husk of a tiny dead spider dropped to the floor. “What a mess,” Win said, beaming. “I’ll have to wash it, too, I suppose.” “If you’d like Poppy to help—” Amelia began. “Don’t you dare send for Poppy,” Win said. “This is my project, and I won’t share it.

I have agreed to walk with my mother late in the day but I’ve come uptown early to wander by myself, feel the sun, take in the streets, be in the world without the interceding interpretations of a companion as voluble as she. At Seventy-third Street I turn off Lexington and head for the Whitney, wanting a last look at a visiting collection. As I approach the museum some German Expressionist drawings in a gallery window catch my eye. I walk through the door, turn to the wall nearest me, and come face to face with two large Nolde watercolors, the famous flowers. I’ve looked often at Nolde’s flowers, but now it’s as though I am seeing them for the first time: that hot lush diffusion of his outlined, I suddenly realize, in intent. I see the burning quality of Nolde’s intention, the serious patience with which the flowers absorb him, the clear, stubborn concentration of the artist on his subject. I see it. And I think, It’s the concentration that gives the work its power. The space inside me enlarges. That rectangle of light and air inside, where thought clarifies and language grows and response is made intelligent, that famous space surrounded by loneliness, anxiety, self-pity, it opens wide as I look at Nolde’s flowers. In the museum lobby I stop at the permanent exhibit of Alexander Calder’s circus. As usual, a crowd is gathered, laughing and gaping at the wonderfulness of Calder’s sighing, weeping, triumphing bits of cloth and wire. Beside me stand two women. I look at their faces and I dismiss them: middle-aged Midwestern blondes, blue-eyed and moony. Then one of them says, “It’s like second childhood,” and the other one replies tartly, “Better than anyone’s first.” I’m startled, pleasured, embarrassed. I think, What a damn fool you are to cut yourself off with your stupid amazement that she could have said that. Again, I feel the space inside widen unexpectedly. That space. It begins in the middle of my forehead and ends in the middle of my groin. It is, variously, as wide as my body, as narrow as a slit in a fortress wall. On days when thought flows freely or better yet clarifies with effort, it expands gloriously. On days when anxiety and self-pity crowd in, it shrinks, how fast it shrinks! When the space is wide and I occupy it fully, I taste the air, feel the light. I breathe evenly and slowly. I am peaceful and excited, beyond influence or threat. Nothing can touch me. I’m safe. I’m free. I’m thinking. When I lose the battle to think, the boundaries narrow, the air is polluted, the light clouds over. All is vapor and fog, and I have trouble breathing. Today is promising, tremendously promising. Wherever I go, whatever I see, whatever my eye or ear touches, the space radiates expansion. I want to think. No, I mean today I really want to think. The desire announced itself with the word “concentration.” I go to meet my mother. I’m flying. Flying! I want to give her some of this shiningness bursting in me, siphon into her my immense happiness at being alive. Just because she is my oldest intimate and at this moment I love everybody, even her.

I rolled around and hit my face to wake myself up, but the pain proved that everything was real - because pain is another word for reality. The surfaces were hard, indeed. My eyes were wide open and lucid, but fear had deformed everything, it had driven me into the hallucination and delirium. I stood up, shook the industrial refuse from my clothes, and went back, my heart beating more strongly than it should have, to the door gaping open in the great building's wall. I knew full well that on the outside, the building was perfectly rectangular, that there was no way for the door to open into a room, and yet it led into a virtual depth, as inexplicable as the depth of a photograph, or the depths of perspective that create a third, and false, dimension in paintings on a wall. If you could go inside a trompe l'oeil mural, you wouldn't descend into its fraudulent depths, you would only get smaller as you moved along unseen lines of perspective. You wouldn't move through constantly changing spaces, with porphyry arches and columns and unintelligible Biblical images opening and closing behind you; rather, they would change their shapes constantly, rectangles would become parallelograms and trapezoids, the arcs of circles would change into hyperbolas, and circle into ellipses, becoming thinner and thinner as they tried to look deeper and farther away. I often thought that the world, along its three dimensions, is an equally deceiving trompe l'oeil for the infinitely more complex eye of our mind, with its two cerebral hemispheres taking in the world at slightly different angles, such that, by combining rational analysis and mystical sensibility, speech and song, happiness and depression, the abject and the sublime, it will make the amazing rosebud of the fourth dimension open before us, with its pearly petals, with its full depth, with its cubic surface, with its hypercubic volume. As though an embryo didn't grow in its mother's womb but arrived, from far away, and only the illusion of perspective made it seem to grow, like a wayfarer approaching along an empty road. A wayfarer who, after he passes through the iliac portal, continues his illusory rise, first an infant, then a child, then an adolescent, and in the end, when he is face-to-face with you and looks you in the eyes, he smiles at you like a friend from the other side of the mirror, having found you again, at last.

I’m tired of sitting. I’m tired of watching everyone else work. I can set my own limits, Amelia. Let me do as I wish.” “No.” Incredulously Amelia watched as Win picked up a broom from the corner. “Win, put that down and stop being silly!” Annoyance whipped through her. “You’re not going to help anyone by expending all your reserves on menial tasks.” “I can do it.” Win gripped the broom handle with both hands as if she sensed Amelia was on the verge of wrenching it away from her. “I won’t overtax myself.” “Put down the broom.” “Leave me alone,” Win cried. “Go dust something!” “Win, if you don’t—” Amelia’s attention was diverted as she saw her sister’s gaze fly to the kitchen threshold. Merripen stood there, his broad shoulders filling the doorway. Although it was early morning, he was already dusty and perspiring, his shirt clinging to the powerful contours of his chest and waist. He wore an expression they knew well—the implacable one that meant you could move a mountain with a teaspoon sooner than change his mind about something. Approaching Win, he extended a broad hand in a wordless demand. They were both motionless. But even in their stubborn opposition, Amelia saw a singular connection, as if they were locked in an eternal stalemate from which neither wanted to break free. Win gave in with a helpless scowl. “I have nothing to do.” It was rare for her to sound so peevish. “I’m sick of sitting and reading and staring out the window. I want to be useful. I want…” Her voice trailed away as she saw Merripen’s stern face. “Fine, then. Take it!” She tossed the broom at him, and he caught it reflexively. “I’ll just find a corner somewhere and quietly go mad. I’ll—” “Come with me,” Merripen interrupted calmly. Setting the broom aside, he left the room. Win exchanged a perplexed glance with Amelia, her vehemence fading. “What is he doing?” “I have no idea.” The sisters followed him down a hallway to the dining room, which was spattered with rectangles of light from the tall multipaned windows that lined one wall. A scarred table ran down the center of the room, every available inch covered with dusty piles of china … towers of cups and saucers, plates of assorted sizes sandwiched together, bowls wrapped in tattered scraps of gray linen. There were at least three different patterns all jumbled together. “It needs to be sorted,” Merripen said, gently nudging Win toward the table. “Many pieces are chipped. They must be separated from the rest.” It was the perfect task for Win, enough to keep her busy but not so strenuous that it would exhaust her. Filled with gratitude, Amelia watched as her sister picked up a teacup and held it upside down. The husk of a tiny dead spider dropped to the floor. “What a mess,” Win said, beaming. “I’ll have to wash it, too, I suppose.” “If you’d like Poppy to help—” Amelia began. “Don’t you dare send for Poppy,” Win said. “This is my project, and I won’t share it.” Sitting at a chair that had been placed beside the table, she began to unwrap pieces of china.

Eric immediately turned around and tried to run back out the door. BONK! He bounced off the door. He tried the wall. Same result. “I’m sorry, but we’ve locked everything down,” Jevvrey said. Eric spun around. Jevvrey was looking at him through the futuristic glasses. He waved to Eric. “Bluetooth Go Wild goggles. $99.99. Available soon for pre-order.” I looked around the room. Jevvrey had added a few things since I’d last seen it. For one, he was sitting on a swivel chair in front of a six-foot-tall black rectangle in the middle of the room. It looked like one of those supercomputers from the movies with switches and buttons and blinking lights all over it. The other thing was Mr. Gregory, sitting at his desk in front of a laptop, looking miserable. “I was hoping you’d make it in time,” Jevvrey said. “In time for what?” “We’re about to find out what happens at the end of the game!” Jevvrey took out his phone and tapped on the screen. “Mark?” Eric asked. Jevvrey nodded. “He’s fading fast now.” He turned the phone around so we could see it. Mark was fading. Not like his health or anything — he was actually disappearing

Hak Nam rose before her as she waded nearer, but with a dream’s logic it grew no closer. Backwashing sea, sucking at her ankles. The Walled City is growing. Being grown. From the fabric of the beach, wrack and wreckage of the world before things changed. Unthinkable tonnage, dumped here by barge and bulk-lifter in the course of the great reconstruction. The minuscule bugs of Rodel-van Erp seethe there, lifting the iron-caged balconies that are sleeping rooms, countless unplanned windows throwing blank silver rectangles back against the fog. A thing of random human accretion, monstrous and superb, it is being reconstituted here, retranslated from its later incarnation as a realm of consensual fantasy. The

All right. You want to know about Nigel. I’ll tell you about Nigel. He’s come a long way since that so-called accident, Jon. Heck, he’s become everything a mother could ever hope for. Do you know what the first thing he showed me was? He showed me how he could listen to six radios tuned into different talk shows and not miss a single word any of them said. And then he turned the radios off and said he could still hear them talking.” More tears welled in her eyes, but she kept smiling. “Then he spoke in different languages. German. Chinese. Japanese. Any language. I kept telling myself that it was okay. He was always a smart kid. I thought maybe he got smarter from being electrocuted. But it got worse. Soon, he had an answer for everything. And if I or anyone else didn’t agree with him, he got very upset.” Her voice cracked, and several tears rolled down her cheeks, but she continued, keeping her composure. “I tried to help him, Jon. But I didn’t know what to do anymore. Then, one day– He said he loved me and was doing everything for me. And then, he kissed me– like he wanted me.” No! Jon closed his eyes tight and rubbed his eyebrows. He didn’t want to hear anymore. The destructive force that had seared his subconscious was coming back. He could feel it getting closer and closer, like an unseen freight train roaring toward him on a moonless night. Then it hit him. He was sitting on the floor of a dark room with nothing but black walls and a door– A black rectangle with bright blue light outlining its frame. He had been there for the longest time, staring at the door. The blue light was coming from something so powerful and destructive that he swore he would remain where he was for all eternity rather than open the door and let it in. Beverly touched his face. “Jon. Please– Tell me Lex didn’t do the same thing to you. Please.” He hugged her tightly with his eyes still closed. “Lex tried to get into my head!” The door was still there. The force behind it was pounding to get into where he was– Pounding, again and again. “She tried to get in and take control, but I wouldn’t let her. I wouldn’t let her!” The pounding grew louder and louder. “And I won’t! I won’t! I love you too much!” The pounding stopped, and he opened his eyes. He was back in the hospital room– embracing his love, and the only thing pounding was his heart. He stroked Beverly's hair and kissed her head. “I’m so sorry. God, I’m so sorry. It’s all my fault.” Beverly pulled away from him. “No, Jon. It’s not your fault.” “But I–” “No! I don’t want to hear it!” It was his fault. He created Lex, wrote her BASIC program, and took Nigel to the control room. None of this would have happened if it hadn’t been for him. Beverly sniffed. “You’re back now, Jon. You have to understand; that’s all that matters.

See, what happens in life, you try this and that, and if you're lucky, you find something that pleases you, that satisfies you, makes you feel good about yourself. If you're not lucky, you find things that hurt less than the other things do. So either way, what you do, you use that information to build a sort of house out of your life, does that make sense? As long as you stay inside those walls, in that floor plan, chances are you won't get creamed." He stretched out an arm, index finger extended, and indicated the rectangle of the room we were in. "Same rooms over and over again, but they're safe. You're trapped, but you're safe. And, of course, the joke is that you have to get as old as I am to understand that I could have walked through those walls anytime. That I should have. Into someplace small and quiet. Someplace I could get my arms around.

In the nursery there is just one window, a small rectangle carved high in the wall. Some mornings the sun reaches through on its way to noon and fills the room with light. The faces of the newborns become so bright that the nurse can’t stand to look at them. The sun passes quickly, but in the minutes before the room returns to bare fluorescence, everything inside insists so baldly on its life that she must look at her shoes in embarrassment.

The neighborhood was deserted, and for good reason. Half of the buildings had been torn down; what formerly must have been a row of dwellings was now a row of holes, homes displaying their innards—beams, rubble, clods of exposed wire—empty spaces held between torn walls and floors, their jagged edges like claws, ripped while clinging to remain whole. In this disorder I could not help but see my mother’s hand. It was as if her death had reached over the ocean, anticipating me, contriving to remove her traces before I arrived. I saw in the pulverized dust an analogue of what my mother had become, something that could be scooped into a plastic bag and carried on my back. I saw in the slabs of broken wood a suggestion of geometry—lines, rectangles, regular shapes, broken and reverted to their original material form.

The back gable of the boardinghouse was still standing, but it was all that remained of their former home. It was blackened and stripped down to its skeleton, like a carcass gnawed to the bone. The roof, walls, and floor had collapsed or gone up in smoke; the windows were nothing more than gaping rectangles framing a perfect blue sky. The birds were singing. Their joyful chirping seemed somehow incongruous with the devastation. At that moment, Vincent envied their ability to simply accept things as they were. They knew how to adapt to any circumstance. All that mattered to them was remaining faithful to their nature: if it rained, they took shelter and waited. If they sensed danger, they moved away from it. If the storm destroyed their nest, they rebuilt it. As long as they had the strength to, they continued at all costs

My chunky rectangle legs felt like THEY were planted in a garden. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. It lumbered toward me, its stubby green arms reaching out for me. All I could do was stare at it. Suddenly, it burst into flames!     It stumbled a few more steps, collapsed, and vanished in a puff of smoke. There was only one logical explanation...   I have LASER VISION!   I bet it comes from my stellar staring skills. I don’t like to brag or anything, but I was the Staring Contest Champion of the entire 4th grade. Of course, it came down to me and Dirk the Jerk. I beat him fair and square! (It’s not MY fault he sneezed. I didn’t give him the cold.)   The bad news is that the other kids started calling me “Googly Eyes” after that. I’m glad I left that nickname back in elementary school. It wouldn’t be cool now that I’m in middle school. But it also means that I can’t remind Dirk the Jerk that I beat him at something.   Anyhow...   Isn’t it cool that I have a superpower here? I’m having a hard time believing it myself. Maybe I have even more superpowers! Maybe I can fly? Or turn invisible? Or walk through walls?   (Um, nope. It’s confirmed. I can’t walk through walls.)   But wait. Maybe I’m super strong! I bet I CAN punch a tree and ONLY break the wood. I can’t wait to try it out tomorrow!

He’d chased Vasquez for nine days now. Someone had warned the programmer just before Cooper got to the Boston walk-up, a brick rectangle where the only light had been a window onto an airshaft and the glowing red eyes of power indicators on computers and routers and surge protectors. The desk chair had been against the far wall as if someone had leaped out of it, and steam still rose from an abandoned bowl of ramen.