The thought of putting on a suit that had been moldering away in Dr. Rhodes's mothbally basement through Johnson's tumid utopianism, Nixon's grim Machiavellianism, Ford's linebackerish solidity, Carter's nutria-incensing malaise, Reagan's ultraviscus trickle-down nonsense, Bush's patrician scanner-amazement, and Clinton's philandering welfare 'reform' struck me as undignified. [...]

[...] He thinks now, maybe it's because she picked it, maybe because she thought it was the one he wanted, and in doing so, made it the one he wanted, because he'd very much wanted her and always felt he'd have to keep wanting her in order to keep her. He tries to remember how, after such hard work, he managed to lose her. And he's not posing a rhetorical question, he's trying to recall the day she left, the argument that would, retrospectively, be called the catalyst (the last straw? there are probably other terms, too), but he can't remember, can't see her angry or hurt or walking away. He is almost certain it was his fault.

--coming from upstairs. Does he want to change this? Does he want to change her leaving him? He needs to decide now. Does he want her to have been here the whole time? Does he want the creaking at the top of the stairs to be her? If she is here, and she is here long enough, will she replace her not-her? He thinks the wind is trying to trick him. The creaking turns to cracking, and the lines of light in the ceiling get wider, and thinks the wind, without knocking, has come inside.

Feels the wind on his face, and thinks it smells like water. Runs downstairs, and the creaking that had turned to a cracking, now becomes a tearing, and his ceiling disintegrates, breaks into hundreds of pieces and disappears. Runs downstairs, wants to go back for her ring, but it's upstairs, and there is no upstairs anymore. Falls against a wall by the front door, and closes his eyes. His home sounds like it is being sucked apart by a vacuum cleaner, or like everything is falling through a hole in the ceiling. The storm is a sink hole in the sky, and everything is disappearing.

[...] how much literary fiction deals with the absolute power that the rest of the planet lives under? It's almost none. But if you read any science fiction or fantasy, there's always a dark lord or a dark side or an emperor. It's always wrestling with this incredible power. The anxieties of the rest of our lived experience are only expressed in the genres. It's the same way that our terror of abjection, our terror of our flimsy bodies, those only find real expression in horror. And yet all of these things are exiled from what we call literary tradition, and because of that, in literary fiction, we have a very attenuated sense of what we call the 'real'. [...]

[...] it's the difference between having an American passport and deciding you're going to live in Paraguay versus having a Paraguayan passport. If you're a high literary writer you can live there your whole life, but you have that fucking passport. Even if you never go home, the possibility of it determines all your choices, all your privilege, and that's a difficult thing for people to embrace and to think about.