“When you're the sane brother of a schizophrenic identical twin, the tricky thing about saving yourself is the blood it leaves on your hands--the little inconvenience of the look-alike corpse at your feet. And if you're into both survival of the fittest and being your brother's keeper--if you've promised your dying mother--then say so long to sleep and hello to the middle of the night. Grab a book or a beer. Get used to Letterman's gap-toothed smile of the absurd, or the view of the bedroom ceiling, or the indifference of random selection. Take it from a godless insomniac. Take it from the uncrazy twin--the guy who beat the biochemical rap.”

“That's the trouble with survival of the fittest, isn't it, Dominick? The corpse at your feet. That little inconvenience.”

“That's the problem with survival of the fittest ... the corpse at your fett. That little inconvenience.”

“If your twin was dead, were you still a twin?”

“That was the big joke, wasn't it? The answer to the riddle: There was no one up there in Heaven, making sure the accounts came out right. I'd solved it, hadn't I? Cracked the code? It was all just a joke. The god inside my brother's head was just his disease. My mother had knelt every night and prayed to her own steepled hands. Your baby died because of ... because of no particular reason at all. Your wife left you because you sucked all the oxygen out of the room, so you pretended she was the one in bed with you while you screwed your girlfriend and her boyfriend hid in the closet, watching.”

“You sit around feelin' sorry for yourself and you're dead. Sittin' on your ass can get to be a disease worse than what you got.”

“Being in your mid-thirties brought benefits, I reminded myself. You began to appreciate tidiness, smallness, things in their place. This is the shape your life has taken, I said. Be existential. Go to sleep.”