"The first rule is that you don't fall in love," he said. "There are other rules too, but that is the main one. No falling in love. No staying in love. No daydreaming of love. If you stick to this you will just about be okay."
Hendrich smiled, like the devil he could be. "Good. You are, of course, allowed to love food and music and champagne and rare sunny afternoons in October. You can love the sight of waterfalls and the smell of old books, but the love of people if off limits. Do you hear me? Don't attach yourself to people, and try to feel as little as you possibly can for those you do meet. Because otherwise you will slowly lose your mind."
She is smiling at me. It is a wistful smile. The kind of smile no one is capable of before the age of forty. The kind that contains sadness and defiance and amusement all at once.
I have been in love only once in my life. I suppose that makes me a romantic, in a sense. The idea that you have one true love, that no one else will compare after they have gone. It's a sweet idea, but the reality is terror itself. To be faced with all those lonely years after. To exist when the point of you has gone.
An end that was also a terrible beginning.
We are time's subjects, and time bids be gone.
She smiled a soft, troubled smile and I felt the whole world slipping away, and I wanted to slip with it, to go wherever she was going. I did not know how to be me, my strange and unusual self, without her. I had tried it, of course. I had existed whole years without her, but that was all it had been. An existence. A book with no words.
I pleaded with God, I asked and begged and bargained, but God did not bargain. God was stubborn and deaf and oblivious.
And without love as an anchor, I had drifted. I had gone to see, on two different voyages, drowning myself in drink, driven only by the determination to find Marion, and hopefully also myself in the process.
I had thought, in coming to Dr. Hutchinson, I was coming to the man with the broadest field of scientific vision, the one most likely to understand my condition, and having this belief slip away felt like a kind of grief. The death of hope itself. I was beyond every field of vision. I was a kind of invisible man.
Maybe Shakespeare was right. Maybe all the world was a stage. Maybe without the act everything would fall apart, The key to happiness wasn't being yourself, because what did that even mean? Everyone had many selves. No. The key to happiness is finding the lie that suits you best.
Everything was theatre. Even justice. Even death. Especially that.
"I love you too. You must be strong, as your father was. I want you to promise; you must stay alive. Whatever happens. You must stay alive. Do you understand me? You are special. God made you this way for a purpose. You must find your purpose. Do you promise to live?" "I promise, mother. I promise, I promise, I promise..."
But she had died, because of me. And I stayed alive, because of her. And for years I regretted the promise I had made.
I know my own face too well to actually see it. Familiarity could make you a stranger to yourself.
I was people I hated and people I admired. I was exciting and boring and happy and infinitely sad. I was both on the right and wrong side of history. I had, in short, lost myself.
It is lonely, this world, without a friend.
"Have you ever killed someone?" "Fuck, man. Phone and wallet. Or I slice your throat." "I have," I told him truthfully. "It's horrible. You don't want that feeling. It's as though you become dead yourself. Like their death inhabits you. It sends you insane. And you carry it, you carry them, inside you, forever..."