"Are you familiar, " Hartfield replied, " with how time flows in cosmic space? "
"No," the reporter answered. "But then no one else is either. "
"What would be the point of writing a novel about things everyone already knows? "
"You like Tokyo?"
"One place or another-it's all the same to me."
"I guess so. I haven't left this town since the Tokyo Olympics."
"You like it here?"
"As you said. It's all the same."
"Yeah."
My late grandmother used to say, "People with dark hearts have dark dreams. Those whose hearts are even darker can't dream at all."
The night she died, the first thing I did was reach out and gently close her eyes. And in that moment, all the dreams she'd seen in her seventy-nine years vanished without a sound (poof!), like a summer shower on hot pavement. Nothing left.
When I go back to the town in summer, I walk the same streets as we did and sit on the stone steps of the same warehouse and look at the ocean. Sometimes I want to cry, but the tears don't come. It's that kind of a thing.