“The alcohol danced down his throat like a contented snake on the way to a magic ball... The lights seemed suddenly brighter... He felt an immediate sense of danger... Electricity... Fear... Excitement... The glass left his lips he needed another. He needed ten, twenty, thirty more...He needed rivers, seas, oceans... He swore under his breath. Somewhere a woman laughed and a man shouted... He looked at the stage. Temptresses dancing... Strange Northern music.... Whores... laws... violence...”

“JAMES HALE sat at a side-street noodle-stall. The stall was set-up underneath the shade of a row of fruit trees. He watched a pair of pigeons courting beneath a fig tree. The male’s tail feathers were pushed up in self-promotion and his plumage was arrogantly puffed up. He danced his elaborate dance of love. The female didn’t look impressed. She turned her back to him. Birds were like gangster rappers, Hale thought. They sang songs about how tough they were and how many other birds they’d nested. They were egomaniacs with inferiority complexes. Posers in a leafy street. The bastards flew at the first sign of danger. They couldn’t make it on the ground. Hale hated birds with their merry chirps and their flimsy nests. Tweet. Tweet. Fucking. Tweet. The only thing Hale admired about them was the fact that they could fly. That would be cool. Right now, flying would be good.”

“This is a man in need. His fear is naked and obvious, but he's lost. . . Somewhere in his darkness.His eyes wide and bleak and tortured. I can soothe him. Join him briefly in the darkness and bring him into the light.”

“It was his opinion that a man had to wait until he was dead to know the meaning of God, unless he happened to have known the sea in his youth.”

“He can hum the music in his old man's quivering voice, but he prefers it in his head, where it lives on in violins and reedy winds. If he imagines it in rehearsal he can remember every step of his three-minute solo as if he had danced it only yesterday, but he knows, too, that one time, onstage in Berlin, he had not danced it as he had learned it; this much he knows but cannot recreate, could no recreate it even a moment after he had finished dancing it. While dancing he had felt blind to the stage and audience, deaf to the music. He had let his body do what it needed to do, free to expand and contract in space, to soar and spin. So, accordingly, when he tries to remember the way he danced it on stage, he cannot hear the music or feel his feet or get a sense of the audience. He is embryonic, momentarily cut off from the world around him. The three most important minutes of his life, the ones that determined his fate and future, are the three to which he cannot gain access, ever.”

“He liked the way her hand felt in his, liked the simple intimacy of the gesture and the way it said - without the need for words - that they were together.”

“Hale looked at the dead man. His baseball cap had fallen from what remained of his head. A head that was once bald beneath that baseball cap. That didn’t matter now. All that remained was meat. Hale guessed that’s all they ever were. Meat. Selfish and stupid animals. The trick was to be the one standing. Hale stepped over the dead man. Walked through the beaded curtain. Through the restaurant out the door and into the China Town circus.”