“Most days what I felt was this: the minute you put a first name and a last name together, you've got a pair of tusks coming right at you (i.e., Watch out, buddy). but on days when I didn't disapprove of everything on principle--days when the whole cologned, cuff-shooting ruck of my co-workers didn't repulse me from the moment they disembarked from the sixth-floor elevator and began squidging their way along the carpeted track that led to the office--my thinking stabbed more along these lines: a name belittles that which is named. Give a person a name and he'll sink right into it, right into the hollows and the dips of the letters that spelled out the whole insultingly reductive contraption, so that you have to pull him up and dance him out of it, take his attendance, and fuck some life into him if you expect to get any work out of him. Multiply him by twenty-two and you will have some idea of what the office was like, except that a good third of my colleagues were female.”

“Then came nights when, lying awake beside my final wife, I would spend too much time putting my finger on what was wrong. I was wearing the finger out. What was wrong was very simple. Sometimes her life and mine fell on the same day.”

“My fore-parts, as you so ineloquently put it, have names.”I pointed to my right breast. “This is Danger.” Then my left. “And this is Will Robinson. I would appreciate it if you addressed them accordingly.” After a long pause in which he took the time to blink several times, he asked, “You named your breasts?”I turned my back to him with a shrug. “I named my ovaries, too, but they don’t get out as much.”

“His name is Arnold. But you’re not on a first name basis with him, and that’s not his first name. So that’s Mr. Arnold to you. Once you get to know him, he may let you call him by his first name, which is Grafmiller. His middle name is his wife’s maiden name: Maiden. Their maid’s first name is Maiden, and her last name is America. Maiden America, though I think she was made in China.”

“I think something must happen to you when you get into eight grade. Like the Doug Swieteck's Brother Gene switches on and you become a jerk. Which may have been Hamlet, Prince of Denmark's problem, who, besides having a name that makes him sound like a breakfast special at Sunnyside Morning Restaurant--something between a ham slice and a three-egg omelet--didn't have the smarts to figure out that when someone takes the trouble to come back from beyond the grave to tell you that he's been murdered, it's probably behooveful to pay attention--which is the adjectival form.”

“Stamp, your name is to be Laura. I'm sharing my name with you. I'm putting my power into you and you must do my work. Don't listen to anyone but me. You are to be my command laid on my enemy. you'll make a hole in him through which he'll drip away until he runs dry. As he drips out darkness, we'll smile together, me inside, you outside. We'll crush him between our smiles.”

“I pulled out my cell, flipped it opened and said Hank’s name into the phone. It rang twice. “You okay?” he asked in greeting. “My life began when I met you,” I told him. There was a beat of silence. Then, I heard him say, “Sunshine –”