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"What is the reason you're so cold to me?" she said.

"There are reasons," Alfred said, "but I will not tell you."

"Why are you so unhappy? Why won't you tell me?"

"I will go to the grave before I tell you. To the grave."

"Oh, oh, oh!"

This was a bad husband she had landed, a bad, bad…

every "real" thing in the world was as shabbily protean, underneath, as this electric chair

The dream of radical transformation: of one day waking up and finding himself a wholly different (more confident, more serene) kind of person, of escaping that prison of the given, of feeling divinely capable.

From the street, if you paid attention, you could see the light in the windows dimming as Gary's train or Enid's iron or Alfred's experiments drained power off the grid. But how lifeless the house looked otherwise. In the lighted houses of the Meisners, of the Schumperts and the Persons and the Roo…

To the boardinghouse a few years after the war came a young steel engineer newly transferred to St. Jude to manage a foundry. He was a full-lipped thick-haired well- muscled boy in a man's shape and a man's suits. The suits were themselves luxuriantly pleated wool beauties. Once or twice every nigh…