“This was too much for him to handle. It was like watching memories of his life play out from a different camera angle, sometimes with new scenes added. He was living DVD extras.”

“He was skinny with soft hair, and his thick, murky eyes watched as the stranger played one more song in the heavy room. From face to face, he looked on as the man played and the woman wept. The different notes handled her eyes. Such sadness.”

“When he recalls it in later years, he will wonder if he is distorting it, embellishing it, because each time he consciously recalls her, that forms a new memory, a new imprint to be stacked on top of the previous one. He fears that too much handling will make it crumble.”

“So much of his life seemed to be like this now, a blur of days without anything to define them from each other, like episodes of a soap he watched out of habit, even though none of the characters interested him.”

“A new chapter in a novel is something like a new scene in a play;”

“It was like watching a movie being played on the blank screen of his mind; the only difference was that he did not get bored, no matter how many times he watched it.”