“Okay, I know--my superpower--I'd be able to shoot lightening bolts out from my fingertips--great big knowledge network lightening bolts--and when a person was zapped by one of those bolts, they'd fall down on their knees and once on their knees, they'd be under water, in this place I saw once off the east coast of the Bahamas, a place where a billion electric blue fish swam up to me and made me a part of their school--and then they'd be up in the air, up in Manhattan, above the World Trade Center, with a flock of pigeons, flying amid the skyscrapers, and then--then what? And then they'd go blind, and then they'd be taken away--they'd feel homesick--more homesick than they'd felt in their entire life--so homesick they were throwing up--and they'd be abandoned, I don't know...in the middle of a harvested corn field in Missouri. And then they'd be able to see again, and from the edges of the field people would appear--everybody they'd known--and they'd be carrying Black Forest cakes and burning tiki lamps and boom boxes playing the same song, and they sky would turn into a sunset, the way it does in Walt Disney brochure, and the person I zapped would never be alone or isolated again.”

“V had been keeping his eye on the guy. After they'd spent hours alone together, they'd parted awkwardly and taken separate showers. Fortunately, though, the hot water had been a reset for them both, and when they'd met up again in the Pit's kitchen, it had been business as usual. And shit remained that way”

“I know what they'd like, they'd like a blank they could fill in. A person already filled in disturbs them terribly.”

“They'd tried, him and Snow. They'd tried and they'd failed, and that felt so much better than not having tried at all.”

“...and then Danny was moving on him in the rhythm they'd found so easily in the past, their bodies remembering the way of it as if they'd never been apart, as if they'd only been waiting to find each other again.”

“They'd listen silenty, with grave faces: but once they'd turn to each other they'd smile cruelly. He couldn't have it both ways. He'd put himself outside and outside they'd make him stay. Neither brutality nor complaining could force a way in.”