Stacking Bricks Quotes

We can't talk about it, or I know she won't so I don't even try, but it's what goes unsaid between people tat builds up like masonry. You have to either knock the bricks out with other things, or let them keep stacking until eventually you are alone in a room.

I’m losing my mind. Seriously. I can’t entertain any thoughts about him in my head and yet… there they are, stacking up like vicious little bricks to remind me of my mistake.

The sun was prying up the clouds and lighting the brick front of the hospital rose red. A thin breeze worked at sawing what leaves were left from the oak trees, stacking them neatly agains the wire cyclone fence. There were little brown birds occasionally on the fence: when a puff of leaves would hit the fence the birds would fly off with the wind. It looked at first like the leaves were hitting the fence and turning into birds and flying away.

Build your scaffolding again, but while you’re conscious. Use the bricks that you’ve still got, in spite of the pandemic. Make coffee in the morning. Meditate. Watch Schitt’s Creek. Have a glass of wine at dinner. FaceTime the friends you can’t see in person. Whatever habits you used to have, stack them up and give yourself structure. I promise. You won’t feel as unsettled.

No secret can remain hidden for ever. Silently and patiently, it waits in the dark. It lets you build your life, carefully stacking the bricks one by one, and then it appears. It deals its blow and everything crumbles. That’s why it remains intact and incorruptible in time, waiting for its ultimate destiny to be revealed.

you could stack a quarter of a million 2x2 bricks on top of each other before the bottom one collapsed.9

If she believes that tigers live, then does she believe that Indians are hunted and dying? If she believes in fish the size of men, does she believe in men who string up others like linefuls of catch? Easier to avoid that history, unwritten as it is except in the soughing of dry grass, in the marks of lost trails, in the rumors from the mouths of bored men and mean girls, in the cracked patterns of buffalo bone. Easier by far to read the history that Teacher Leigh teaches, those names and dates orderly as bricks, stacked to build a civilization

He moves a stack of hardcovers off the sofa, then crosses the room to take the chair behind the desk. His expression seems to tease, See? I’m perfectly harmless over here. Except nothing about him looks harmless to me. He looks like a Swiss Army knife. A man with six different means to undo me. This Charlie, for making you spill your secrets. This one for making you laugh. This one can turn you on. This is the one who will convince you you’re capable of anything. Here is the Charlie who will pull you into his lap to form your human barricade at a hospital. And the one with the power to take you apart brick by brick.

Where the years ahead had once seemed vague and unknowable, amorphous in shape and indeterminable in size, after my mother died I began to see a set of decades stacked neatly in front of me like bricks...When I allowed myself to think of the brevity of the time ahead of me, and the futility of spending any more of it on cooking and mending and gardening, it frightened me so much that I almost couldn't breathe.

These bricks came from kilns that were in China. Then the cargo ships that brought the refugees over, ships meant to be filled with lumber or coal, those ships couldn't draft right with their soft, human loads. Even packed with people, the ships were not heavy enough, so the owners stacked bricks down there with them." He kicked at the exposed cobblestones and said, "Imagine the misery. Then they sold the bricks to the Anaconda, and you can still find these cobblestones on the back railway streets from Seattle to here. Everywhere the Chinese worked building the railways, t

Spring Lane burned with a mythology of chipped slates, pale wash-water blue and flaking at the seam. The summer yellow glow of an impending dawn diffused, diluted in the million-gallon sky above the tannery that occupied this low end of the ancient gradient, across the narrow street from where Phyllis and Michael stood outside the alley-mouth. The tannery’s high walls of browning brick with rusted wire mess over its high windows didn’t have the brutal aura that the building had down in the domain of the living. Rather it was softly iridescent with a sheen of fond remembrance – the cloisters of some mediaeval craft since disappeared – and had the homely perfume of manure and boiled sweets. Past the peeling wooden gates that lolled skew-whiff were yards where puddles stained a vivid tangerine harboured reflected chimney stacks, lamp black and wavering. Heaped leather shavings tinted with corrosive sapphire stood between the fire-opal pools, an azure down mounded into fantastic nests by thunderbirds to hatch their legendary fledglings. Rainspouts eaten through by time had diamond dribble beading on their chapped tin lips, and every splinter and subsided cobble sang with endless being. Michael Warren stood entranced and Phyllis Painter stood beside him, sharing his enchantment, looking at the heart-caressing vista through his eyes. The district’s summer sounds were, in her ears, reduced to a rich stock. The lengthy intervals between the bumbling drones of distant motorcars, the twittering filigree of birdsong strung along the guttered eaves, the silver gurgle of a buried torrent echoing deep in the night-throat of a drain, all these were boiled down to a single susurrus, the hissing tingling reverberation of a cymbal struck by a soft brush. The instant jingled in the breeze.

So much we once coveted. So much That would have saved us, but lived, Instead, its own quick span, returning To uselessness with the mute acquiescence Of shed skin. It watches us watch it: Our faulty eyes, our telltale heat, hearts Ticking through our shirts. We’re here To titter at gimcracks, the naïve tools, The replicas of replicas stacked like bricks. There’s green money, and oil in drums. Pots of honey pilfered from a tomb. Books Recounting the wars, maps of fizzled stars. In the south wing, there’s a small room Where a living man sits on display. Ask, And he’ll describe the old beliefs. If you Laugh, he’ll lower his head to his hands And sigh. When he dies, they’ll replace him With a video looping on ad infinitum. Special installations come and go. “Love” Was up for a season, followed by “Illness,” Concepts difficult to grasp. The last thing you see (After a mirror—someone’s idea of a joke?) Is an image of an old planet taken from space. Outside, vendors hawk t-shirts, three for eight.

Because this land they live in is a land of missing things. A land stripped of its gold, its rivers, its buffalo, its Indians, its tiger, its jackals, its birds and its green and its living. To move through this land and believe Ba's tales is to see each hill as a burial mound with its own crown of bones. Who could believe that and survive? Who could believe that and keep from looking, as Ba and Sam do, always toward the past? Letting it drag behind them. Letting it make them into fools. And so Lucy fears that unwritten history. Easier to dismiss all Ba's tales as tall ones - because believe, and where does it end? If she believes that tigers live, then does she believe that Indians are hunted and dying? If she believes in fish the size of men, does she believe in men who string up others like linefuls of catch? Easier to avoid that history, unwritten as it is except in the soughing of dry grass, in the marks of lost trails, in the rumors from the mouths of bored men and mean girls, in the cracked patterns of buffalo bone. Easier by far to read the history that Teacher Leigh teaches, those names and dates orderly as bricks, stacked to build a civilization.

We could also see birches in the woods beyond the thirteen-foot-high fences. And we could see women prisoners in the adjacent field; if the girls saw their mothers among them, they could throw their bread to them, hoping that they would not loft it back, as our rations were greater than anyone else's in the camp. We could see the labs we were taken to on Tuesdays and Thursdays and Saturdays, the two-story buildings of brick, but the rest of our view was limited. If someone had cause to pluck us up and take us somewhere, then there was more we might learn of Auschwitz, but otherwise, we did not see the section of camp called Canada, which featured a series of warehouses so overwhelmed with pillaged splendor that the prisoners named it after a country that represented wealth and luxury to them. Inside Canada's structures, our former possessions loomed in stacks: our spectacles, our coats, our instruments, our suitcases, all of it, even down to our teeth, our hair, anything that could be considered necessary to the business of being human. We did not see the sauna where inmates were stripped, or the little white farmhouse whose rooms were passed off as showers. We did not see the luxuriant headquarters of the SS, where parties took place, parties where the women of the Puff were brought in to dance and sit upon Nazi laps. We did not see, and so we believed we already knew the worst. We couldn't image the greatness of suffering, how artful and calculating it could be, how it could pluck off the members of a family, one after the other, or show an entire village the face of death in one fell swoop.

The car ploughed uphill through the long squalid straggle of Tevershall, the blackened brick dwellings, the black slate roofs glistening their sharp edges, the mud black with coal-dust, the pavements wet and black. It was as if dismalness had soaked through and through everything. The utter negation of natural beauty, the utter negation of the gladness of life, the utter absence of the instinct for shapely beauty which every bird and beast has, the utter death of the human intuitive faculty was appalling. The stacks of soap in the grocers’ shops, the rhubarb and lemons in the green-grocers’! the awful hats in the milliners’! all went by ugly, ugly, ugly, followed by the plaster-and-gilt horror of the cinema with its wet picture announcements, “A Woman’s Love!”, and the new big Primitive chapel, primitive enough in its stark brick and big panes of greenish and raspberry glass in the windows. The Wesleyan chapel, higher up, was of blackened brick and stood behind iron railings and blackened shrubs. The Congregational chapel, which thought itself superior, was built of rusticated sandstone and had a steeple, but not a very high one. Just beyond were the new school buildings, expensive pink brick, and graveled playground inside iron railings, all very imposing, and mixing the suggestion of a chapel and a prison. Standard Five girls were having a singing lesson, just finishing the la-me-do-la exercises and beginning a “sweet children’s song.” Anything more unlike song, spontaneous song, would be impossible to imagine: a strange bawling yell that followed the outlines of a tune. It was not like savages: savages have subtle rhythms. It was not like animals: animals mean something when they yell. It was like nothing on earth, and it was called singing... What could possibly become of such a people, a people in whom the living intuitive faculty was dead as nails, and only queer mechanical yells and uncanny will power remained?

Hypocrisy—in other words, the practice of lying about lying—shields us from seeing ourselves as we are: a collocation of fragments that fit together as a biological unit but not as anything else, not as that ghost which has been called a self, a phantasm whose ecotoplasmic unreality we can never see through. By staying true to the lie of the self, the ego, we can hold onto the illusion that we will be who we are all our lives and not see our selves die a thousand times before our death. While some have dedicated themselves to getting to the bottom of how these parts create the illusion of a whole, this is not how pyramids are built. To get a pyramid off the ground takes a lot of ego—the base material of those stacks of stones that tourists visit while on vacation. Of course, a pyramid is actually a polyhedron, that is, a mathematical conception which pyramids in the physical world resemble . . . at least from a distance. The nearer one gets to a pyramid, the more it reveals itself to be what it is: a roughly pyramidal conglomeration of bricks, a composition of fragments that is not what it seems to be. This is also how it works with humans. The world around us encourages the build up of our egos—those pyramids of self-esteem—as if we needed such encouragement. Although everyone is affected by this pyramid scheme, some participate in it more than others: they are observably more full of themselves and tend to their egos as they would exotic plants in a hothouse. It helps if they can wear down the self-esteem of others, or simply witness this erosion. As the American novelist and essayist Gore Vidal said famously and often: “It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.” None of this could work without the distance we put between what we are and what we think we are. Then we may appear to exist apart from our constituent elements. Self-esteem would evaporate without a self to esteem. As with pyramids, it is only at a distance that this illusion can be pulled off. Hypocrisy is that distance.

EVERYONE WHO served in the Iraq war knew the stories about the missing American cash. Not long after the U.S. invaded Iraq, the U.S. government secretly flew twelve billion dollars in cash to Baghdad. I know it’s hard to believe, and it sounds like it was made up by one of those wacko left-wing conspiracy-obsessed blogs on the Internet. But it’s a matter of documented fact. Twelve billion dollars in U.S. banknotes was trucked from the Federal Reserve Bank in East Rutherford, New Jersey, to Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, where it was put on pallets and loaded on C-130 military transport planes and flown to Baghdad. The idea, I guess, was that this was the only way to pay our contractors working in Iraq and run the puppet government: in stacks of Benjamins. Baghdad was awash in crisp new American banknotes. Gunnysacks full of cash sat around, unguarded, in Iraqi ministry offices. Bureaucrats and soldiers played football with bricks of hundred-dollar bills. And here’s the best part: Somehow, nine billion dollars just disappeared. Vanished. Without a trace.

A child, maybe five, catches my eye. He has stacked his Lego bricks into a tall building. After showing everyone his feat, he pulls one arm back and with a swift chop tumbles them all to the ground. A human instinct, I muse. Destroy that which we have built.

Worst Comes To Worst" (feat. Guru) [Babu mixing] "Worst come to worst my peoples come first" "Worst...come.....to worst" "Worst come to worst my peoples come first" "Worst come...to...worst" "Worst come to worst my peoples come first" [Evidence talking] Yeah It's goin down y'all That's Babu Yo, some people got good friends, at night I live my life right Intense, on the edge On the wild, I'm from the group where friction leads to fire Stack your bricks, the time is take your pick Do or don't, the track - Alchemist My life is good, I got my peeps in the mix, so... "Worst come to worst my people come first" [Iriscience] I got worldwide family all over the earth And I worry 'bout 'em all for whatever it's worth From the birth to the hearse, the streets, the guns burst Words I disperse are here to free minds And if mine are needy I need to feed mine "When worst come to worst..." [Evidence] Set up shop and write a verse Actually (what?), that's best come to best My lyrics take care of me, they therapy Get shit off my chest Extra stress, three-four over the score Different patterns of rhymin prepare me for war So next time you see us we'll be deadly on tour [Babu mixing] "Oh, when you need me" "Worst come to worst my peoples come first" [Guru talking] Word up, if worst comes to worst, I make whole crews disperse You know it's family first Gifted Unlimited with Dilated Peoples Babu, Evidence, Iriscience And a shout out to my man Alchemist on the trizzack "Oh, when you need me" "Worst come to worst my peoples come first" [Iriscience] I'm a glutton for the truth, even though truth hurts I've studied with my peoples on streets and in church We make it hard when we go on first Long road, honor of the samurai code These California streets ain't paved with gold Worst comes to worst "Worst come to worst my people come first" [Evidence] Uh, I got them back, at the end of the day We could go our seperate ways but the songs remains, it won't change Got my target locked at range I might switch gears but first I switch lanes Without my people I got nothin to gain That's why... "Worst come to worst my people come first" [Iriscience] Special victims unit, catalyst for movement Creates to devastate, since '84 show improvement Definitely Dilated Peoples comes first Cross-trainin spar, we raise the bar And we put it in your ear no matter who you are [Babu mixing] "Oh, when you need me" "Worst come to worst my peoples come first" "Worst....come...worst my peoples come first" "Worst...worst....worst....come to worst my peoples come first" "...my..my...my peoples come first "Oh, when you need me

A brick could be held in one hand, and a stack of dollar bills in the other, to illustrate the difference in weight between the real and the imaginary. The imaginary only weighs more when you believe in it, and then once you stop believing in it, it weighs next to nothing. 


and using as edging some of the small stack of old bricks I found under a hummock of ivy in the corner. Another bed was earmarked for my baby Brown Turkey fig tree and I hoped the plum tree in the middle – if it was a plum – would burst into leaf and fruit eventually. It was all very exciting – to me, at any rate! And all the exercise was good for me too, because I had to go and soak the aches away in the bath afterwards, lying like a slightly strange Ophelia among a scattering of dried attar of roses-scented geranium leaves. The nicest thing about living in Sticklepond was that Poppy could drop in much more often, after meetings or whenever she had

view of the brick wall next door. Once inside, Ronnie took it all in. Not that there was much to take in. A mattress in the middle of the floor, a portable TV, a stack of books—mostly mysteries, I’m embarrassed to say. Some gay porn magazines. Under his breath he said, “Thank God. I’ve arrived just in time.

Approximately three thousand people work for the Bureau of Engraving. It takes 490 notes to make a pound, and it would require 14.5 million notes to make a stack one mile high. Coin and paper account for only about 8 percent of all the dollars in the world. The rest are merely numbers in a ledger or tiny electronic blips on a computer chip. At the end of the process, the workers bundle the bills into packages of 100, which they then stack into bricks of 4,000. These bricks are loaded onto a pallet for transport to the basement from where they will be sent to the various Federal Reserve offices around the nation for distribution to banks and the public. Along the way, the curious visitors pepper the guides with questions: Q. Why are so many employees listening to music on headphones? A. To block the loud sound of the printing, cutting, and stacking machines. Q. Why are some of them eating? A. They are on break. Q. Why are all of the checkers so fat? A. Because they sit all day and watch money go by with little chance for exercise.

The public library was a small brick building two blocks away from the elementary school. A

They had this house of chimneys whose bricks contained the blood of pigs and calves so that a greasy sadness drifted in the festive rooms. They had this house of tears of lace constructed of a million tiny knots of useless knowledge. This house of windows hung with the desperations of dark virgins. They had this house of stacked sandstone colored the richest clay-red and lavender hue. Once this stone had formed the live heart of sacred islands. Now it was a fashionable backdrop to their ambitions.

Beneath us in the lantern-light I could see doz-ens of carved limestone blocks wedged in with stacks of small bricks. “That’s the gateway for Batavia Castle in Java,” he explained. “It will be the grand entrance when assembled.

These bricks came from kilns that were in China. Then the cargo ships that brought the refugees over, ships meant to be filled with lumber or coal, those ships couldn't draft right with their soft, human loads. Even packed with people, the ships were not heavy enough, so the owners stacked bricks down there with them." He kicked at the exposed cobblestones and said, "Imagine the misery. Then they sold the bricks to the Anaconda, and you can still find these cobblestones on the back railway streets from Seattle to here. Everywhere the Chinese worked building the railways, tamping black powder into spark holes, or digging for copper. Everywhere they died.

There’s a large living area that opens into the kitchen at the far end, with tall windows that look over the wide expanse of sky and sea. The white linen couch and armchairs are rumpled and so soft, they threaten to swallow you when you drop into them. Braided rugs lie higgledy-piggledy, a patchwork of color over wide knotted floorboards. A fireplace is set into a brick wall, painted white and stained with smoke from years of use. There’s a stack of logs on one side and a vintage steamer trunk that’s full of blankets on the other. An upright piano stands under the staircase that leads to the second floor.

The art critic Robert Hughes pointed out that if you were to take the pile of bricks that compromises Carl Andre’s minimalist sculpture Equivalent VIII (1966) out of the museum and place it in a parking lot, it would no longer be a work of art but a neat stack of building materials. If you were to put a sculpture by Rodin in a parking lot, by contrast, it would be a ‘misplaced’ work of art. Hughes was emphasizing that the Rodin is identified as art by its form, while the Andre (which Hughes also admired) is identified as art by the idea behind it. For all that I have issues with this tendency to draw battle lines between form and content, to trust in the aura of an artwork and to assume that art should be found in museums and never parking lots, it does identify a useful distinction: a large part of the contemporary art I like does not aspire to independence from the everyday world but to alert us to it.

Bricks are good for houses and buildings; they are strong and very reliable. You can stack bricks on top of one another and they won’t fall unless you use the wrong glue. It has to be a glue that has the ability to hold the entire structure together, if not, you will have a huge mess on your hands. Somehow, this house was still standing even though the glue that held the whole thing together died a long time ago. It was

There once was a town. It was a quaint little town, in a quiet valley, where life moved at the pace of snails and the only road in was the only way out, too. There was a candy store that sold the sweetest honey taffy you ever tasted, and a garden store that grew exotic, beautiful blooms year-round. The local café was named after a possum that tormented its owner for years, and the chef there made the best honey French toast in the Northeast. There was a bar where the bartender always knew your name, and always served your burgers slightly burnt, though the local hot sauce always disguised the taste. If you wanted to stay the weekend, you could check-in at the new bed-and-breakfast in town--- just as soon as its renovations were finished, and just a pleasant hike up Honeybee Trail was a waterfall there, rumor had it, if you made a wish underneath it, the wish would come true. There was a drugstore, a grocer, a jewelry store that was open only when Mercury was in of retrograde--- And, oh, there was a bookstore. It was tucked into an unassuming corner of an old brick building fitted with a labyrinthine maze of shelves stocked with hundreds of books. In the back corner was a reading space with a fireplace, and chairs so cozy you could sink into them for hours while you read. The rafters were filled with glass chimes that, when the sunlight came in through the top windows, would send dapples of colors flooding across the stacks of books, painting them in rainbows. A family of starlings roosted in the eaves, and sang different songs every morning, in time with the tolls of the clock tower. The town was quiet in that cozy, sleepy way that if you closed your eyes, you could almost hear the valley breathe as wind crept through it, between the buildings, and was sighed out again.

A brick could be used to decorate a house. And not just one brick, thousands could be stacked and affixed together and really make your house not only feel like a home, but less drafty too.


Without rules, there’d be nothing to break. Well, except glass, dance, and bricks. So I guess bricks could be stacked up in place of a list of rules.


At only nine in the morning the kitchen was already pregnant to its capacity, every crevice and countertop overtaken by Marjan's gourmet creations. Marinating vegetables ('torshis' of mango, eggplant, and the regular seven-spice variety), packed to the briny brims of five-gallon see-through canisters, sat on the kitchen island. Large blue bowls were filled with salads (angelica lentil, tomato, cucumber and mint, and Persian fried chicken), 'dolmeh,' and dips (cheese and walnut, yogurt and cucumber, baba ghanoush, and spicy hummus), which, along with feta, Stilton, and cheddar cheeses, were covered and stacked in the enormous glass-door refrigerator. Opposite the refrigerator stood the colossal brick bread oven. Baking away in its domed belly was the last of the 'sangak' bread loaves, three feet long and counting, rising in golden crests and graced with scatterings of poppy and nigella seed. The rest of the bread (paper-thin 'lavash,' crusty 'barbari,' slabs of 'sangak' as well as the usual white sliced loaf) was already covered with comforting cheesecloth to keep the freshness in. And simmering on the stove, under Marjan's loving orders, was a small pot of white onion soup (not to be mistaken for the French variety, for this version boasts dried fenugreek leaves and pomegranate paste), the last pot of red lentil soup, and a larger pot of 'abgusht.' An extravaganza of lamb, split peas, and potatoes, 'abgusht' always reminded Marjan of early spring nights in Iran, when the cherry blossoms still shivered with late frosts and the piping samovars helped wash down the saffron and dried lime aftertaste with strong, black Darjeeling tea.

First, Andrew Carnegie would supply bricks, mortar, and even blueprints for library buildings, but local communities and librarians had to pay for and select the books on the shelves. No less critical was Melvil Dewey’s decimal system of classification: the old system of having librarians guard and fetch books from closed stacks gave way to user-friendly open stacks where readers could find books on their own—a method pioneered by Carnegie himself. The first generation of public librarians diligently kept out improper books and tried to restrict the circulation of light fiction. But by the 1920s the winds of liberalism were sweeping through American society, and second-generation librarians were more inclined to give the public what they wanted.

Every few years, a teacher from Monroe Colored High loaded a band of students onto the flat bed of a pickup truck and rattled across the Missouri Pacific Railway tracks. They passed the rich people’s porticos and pulled up to the back entrance of the white high school in town. The boys jumped out and began stacking the truck bed with the books the white school was throwing away. That is how Monroe Colored High School got its books. The boys loaded the truck with old geography and English texts, some without covers and with pages torn out and love notes scrawled in the margins, and headed back to their side of town. By the time he was old enough to understand where the books came from, Pershing was fast putting together the pieces of the world he lived in. He knew there was a dividing line, but it was hitting him in the face now. He was showing a talent for science and was getting to the point that he needed reference books to do his lesson. But it was against the law for colored people to go to the public library. “And the library at the Colored High School did not live up to its name,” he said years later. He was in the eighth grade when word filtered to his side of the tracks that Monroe was getting a new high school. It wouldn’t replace the old building that Monroe Colored High was in. It was for the white students, who already had a big school. It would be called Neville High. The colored people could see it going up when they ventured to the other side of the tracks. It rose up like a castle, four stories of brick and concrete with separate wings and a central tower, looking as if it belonged at Princeton or Yale. It opened in 1931 on twenty-two acres of land. The city fathers made a fuss over the state-of-the-art laboratories for physics and chemistry, the 2,200-seat balconied auditorium, the expanded library, and the fact it was costing $664,000 to build. As the new high school took shape across town, Pershing watched his father rise in the black of morning to milk the cows and walk the mile and a half to open his building the size of a grade school. His father, his mother, and the other teachers at Monroe Colored High School were working long hours with hand-me-down supplies for a fraction of the pay their white counterparts were getting. In Louisiana in the 1930s, white teachers and principals were making an average salary of $1,165 a year. Colored teachers and principals were making $499 a year, forty-three percent of what the white ones were.

The area confirmed his feelings about Giudecca: bleak cement buildings, crudely rectangular, devoid of any attempt at embellishment or adornment: cubes for living in, worsened – at least in his eyes – by the view: across the sullen waters of the laguna sprawled the petrochemical horror of Marghera, staggered rows of brick smokestacks from which spewed, day and night… Brunetti’s thoughts stopped there, for he had, like the other residents of Venice, little idea of what rose up in thick clouds from those stacks and even less reason to believe what he was told it was.

Past the projects, the land opened up and water came into view. The breeze carried rain and salt. Jetties and barrier walls supported the shore, which was stacked with crumbling brick warehouses. Out in the channel, the Statue of Liberty stood alone on her little island, her corroding flame held high in the air as the sun set over the industrial shoreline and skyways of New Jersey. Across the narrows, the bluffs of Staten Island wavered in the smoky light of dusk that turned the Verrazano into bronze. Faint light burnished water into busy with freighters and tug boats. A lone sail boat flitted in the distance. On the near shore, on a slip of water between a jetty and the land, a blood red barge bobbed on the tide.

money untouched he inspected the left side. It looked like the nail head rusted just enough for the tin to pop off, but he decided to check behind anyway. He pulled the tin away from the wall and looked into the dimly lit space. To his surprise, something was there. He reached in and pulled out a large cardboard envelope. The envelope was a heavy one used to mail important documents and looked like it had been there for a while. It was addressed to Edward, but there was no return address. The top was open, so Adam reached inside. He pulled out a small stack of papers and pictures. The picture on top was of a group of people standing in front of Town Hall. It must have been the Grand Opening, because they were all dressed in formal clothes and there were decorations hanging in the background. If it was the Grand Opening, the picture was from 1910. He had learned the year it was built while on a class trip a few years before. The date was carved into a brick near the main entrance. Adam looked at the picture a little closer. Each of the people wore the same lapel pin as the one Edward wore in his portrait.

an instant, a simple swatch of light, then movement: the blond-haired executioner. She stood in a doorway just beyond the street corner, hiding, waiting, arms raised and weapon trained. The reflection in the car window saved Dewey from what would have been, in five feet or so, a warm bullet in the back of the head. Dewey stopped just before the corner, feet away from where the blond assassin lurked. He looked behind him, down the block he’d just run down, and saw a Laundromat. He dropped back and entered the Laundromat. He ran through the store, pushing his way past piles of laundry and women folding articles, to the back room, where a man sat, smoking a cigarette in front of a pile of papers. “Lo siento,” murmured Dewey as he charged through the office toward an alley entrance, gun in hand. The sirens became louder, multiple vehicles joining in the distance. Out the door and across the alley and through a dented steel door. Inside, stacks of bread loaves, other boxes of food, the smell of meat. He moved through the storage room and entered the back of a bodega. Colt .45 cocked in front of him, he passed a middle-aged woman who fainted as she saw the weapon in his hand. Catching the eye of the man at the cash register, Dewey held a finger to his lips. There, at the side of the entrance, her back to the store, stood the blond assassin. Suddenly another customer, an elderly woman, screamed as she saw Dewey with gun. The blonde turned abruptly, leveling what he now saw was an HK UMP compact machine gun with a six-inch suppressor on the end. A full auto hail of bullets crashed through the windows as she swept the weapon east-west. The elderly woman’s screams ended abruptly as a bullet ripped through her head and killed her. The assassin’s bullets shattered the storefront’s glass, but Dewey was already down and partially hidden by a chest freezer, which shielded him from the slugs. As soon as the blonde’s gun swept past him, Dewey had a clear sight. He fired twice, two quick shots into the assassin’s neck and chest, flinging her backward onto the brick sidewalk in a shower of blood and glass. Dewey ran

In the distance, smoke plumes from brick kilns where men, women and children will spend their entire lives on their knees under the sun cooling, patting, stacking, packing red bricks that are sent across the country. They will never leave that burning land, always thousands of rupees short of freeing themselves from their debts to the kiln’s owner

friends had started hanging around. Franny could feel her stomach hardening and twisting into knots when they arrived, pushing and shoving one another and tripping over their huge basketball shoes. It was a wonder they didn’t knock over a display rack or topple one of the neatly stacked pyramids of paint cans. They seemed to be everywhere at once, and she couldn’t possibly keep an eye on all of them. Actually, she was a little afraid of them. While they dressed like kids, she knew they were actually young men. They were bigger than she was and full of rough male energy. From what she observed it seemed Ben was their leader and they were reporting to him. She was sure they were up to no good. Their whispered conversation was full of winks and nudges, and they constantly checked over their shoulders to see if they were being overheard. She tried to keep her distance, but if she had to approach them to help a customer, she noticed they would move away or fall silent. Whenever Mr. Slack appeared, they disappeared. Returning to the invoices, Franny went through them one more time. She couldn’t understand it. According to the paperwork, the store had received enough batteries to last through the summer, based on her best estimate using last year’s figures. They’d gotten twenty boxes each of AA and D batteries, the most popular sellers, and ten boxes each of the other sizes. Last week she’d noticed the display rack was nearly empty, and she’d asked Ben to fill it. “Can’t,” he’d said, avoiding her eyes. “They’re all gone.” “There should be plenty in the storeroom,” she’d insisted, looking curiously at his two buddies, who were lounging by the paint display. They seemed to find the conversation extremely amusing. “Go check again.” “There’s no point. I’m telling you, they’re all gone. Look, I’m taking a break now,” he’d said, signaling his friends to follow him outside. Sure enough, she couldn’t find any batteries in the storeroom, either. She was sure they hadn’t been sold; she would have noticed the unusual number of sales and ordered more. Where had they gone? It was very disturbing, especially since she’d been having such a hard time lately making up the bank deposit. That was always the first task of the day. She would take the previous day’s take out of the safe and add up the checks and cash, square them with the total sales figure, and fill out the deposit slip. Then Mr. Slack would put the whole business in a blue vinyl zippered pouch and take it to the red-brick bank across the street. For the past few weeks, however, she hadn’t been able to get the figures to match, even though

Have you ever seen workers build a brick building? They don’t just stack the bricks on top of each other. They need some sort of glue to hold all those bricks together. The glue for bricks is called mortar. In the same way, your body is made up of 37.2 trillion little bricks called cells. And like a building, those cells need some sort of glue to hold them all together. The glue for cells is called laminin. Laminin holds your body together. The thing that’s even more amazing about laminin is what it looks like. When you take a peek at laminin (and you’ll need an electron microscope to see it), it looks like . . . a cross.

We’re going into the countryside and leaving everything behind. I would hate to have this book destroyed. The Germans will burn whatever they find.” She took an old volume from a pile of books that had been stacked against a brick wall. “Would you burn birds in a cage?” she asked Anne. “Of course not.” Anne thought of the magpie. She thought of the soldiers shooting at whatever they saw, just for fun. “And yet they burn books. They throw them into metal trash cans and light a fire and then all the words that had been written fly away.” “What happens to the words then?” Anne asked. “They’re remembered by everyone who ever read them.” Madame Clara’s bright eyes were trained on Anne. It was dark in the alley and Anne had the urge to run, but she stayed where she was. “I used to have everything,” the bookseller’s wife said. “Now I just have what I can remember.

And that lump of concrete, she belatedly realised, had been a fragment of the Berlin Wall. Hence its presence in the O.B.'s study. Much of his life had been dedicated to bringing that wall down, or that was how it appeared in retrospect. Perhaps it had simply been dedicated to fighting those who'd put it up, the wall itself being no more than a marker of which side he'd been on. Given a different birthplace, he might have been equally happy resisting the values of the west. Either way, at the end of the long road travelled, that chunk had come to rest on his bookshelf, symbolic of a temporary victory. Because history was cyclical, of course, and more walls would be built, and there'd always be those who hoped it would be better on one side than the other, and die attempting to find out. And in the longer run those walls would fall too, along with the despots who'd built them, crushed by the bricks they'd stacked so high. Walls couldn't last.