"Was I sleeping, while others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today?
I’m just biding my time. Waiting in the shadows and watching her receive all the gifts I leave her. They make her nervous. She hates chocolates and flowers and jewelry, so I shower her with them. She’s on edge, yet I think she likes to be scared. No—I know she likes the thrill of fear. Her journal goes into great detail about her dark desires; how much she yearns to being stalked, chased, kidnapped, and taken.
So, being the ever-loving big brother that I am, I intend to bring all her fucked-up fantasies to life while she begs for my forgiveness.
I stretched and glanced at James, who was the smallest of us boys—barely five ten, slim but not skinny. There was something almost catlike about him, a kind of primal agility. (For animal work, Camilo had assigned him the leopard. He spent a month prowling around our room in the dark before he was sufficiently absorbed in the role to pounce on me in my sleep. I spent the next half hour waiting for my heart to stop hammering while I assured him that, yes, my cry of terror had been entirely genuine.)
Scene 9Kitabı okudu
They became the roots of a tree, buried deep underground, out of sight, twined together, entangled together, strengthening each other, weakening each other, taking all the love like nourishment, storing it in secret places, all the while waiting for the tree that had been violently cut to sprout leaves again.
Sayfa 189Kitabı okudu
“I want to know everything about you.”
“I wonder if that’s necessarily for the best. Don’t you think sometimes people might be happier together if they simply let some false impressions stand?”
“Then I’ll wait outside in the hallway while you plant seeds of false impressions.”
“Nah, that’s okay. I get my kicks out of pruning myself, but today I feel more like letting loose.”
Sayfa 175
"What do you do while waiting to die? Read, or try to. You want so badly for it to end this way—apartment clean, phone off, sitting on your bed, book in your lap, glancing out the window onto light and sun and life below. But you’re impatient, easily bored: tough to lose yourself in fiction while anticipating a fatal hemorrhage."
Quotations every day in the year. To be or not to be. Wisdom while you wait.
A memorable example of how body language can sometimes be more truthful than verbal language involved the rape of a young woman on the Parker Indian Reservation in Arizona. A suspect in the case was brought in for questioning. His words sounded convincing and his story was plausible. He claimed he hadn’t seen the victim and while out in a field had gone down a row of cotton, turned left, and then walked straight to his house. While my colleagues jotted down notes about what they were hearing, I kept my eyes on the suspect and saw that as he told the story about turning left and going home, his hand gestured to his right, which was exactly the direction that led to the rape scene. If I hadn’t been watching him, I wouldn’t have caught the discrepancy between his verbal (“I went left”) and nonverbal (hand gesturing to the right) behavior. But once I saw it I suspected he was lying. I waited a while and then confronted him again, and in the end he confessed to the crime.
