S. / SHIP OF THESEUS - DOUG DORST & J.J. ABRAMS

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 446

 Inside his head, the voices pulse with ancient agonies. This place must have been the site of unimaginable suffering, of hearts and souls and lives stolen from the people that these voices once were.*

*As I write this final note, sitting in the cramped and dusty office of Winged Shoes Press on New York's East 33rd street, it occurs to me that hearts and souls and lives can themselves be sites of unimaginable suffering.

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 443

 "We will thrive as long as you, our valued customers--and yes, we value you, despite your repellence, for you are the providers of grandeur and ease, you are the brandy-drowned ortolans whose bones gloriously lacerate our gums, you are the soft, yielding flesh beneath our thrusting hips--as long as you value power and profits and political gamesmanship over the search for love and serenity, over the lives and the dignity of all (including and especially those who are not you and are not known to you), over calm acceptance of your place as one--just one!--tiny and finite arrangement of molecules in a vast universe... 

 We will thrive... for as long as you choose extraction over creation, as long as you mistake commerce for art and destruction for progress, as long as you remain drunk on the juice that issues from the crush of a thing or place or person. We will thrive as long as you conflate power with influence, primacy with honor, goal with purpose, duty with responsibility, for thus is our business...perpetuated...thus does it hum with ever greater velocity. Our fondest hope is to continue to exploit your toxic dreams and to do so limitlessly, for thus may we claim our prenegotiated percentage of your--and, in many cases, your adversary's--personal infinity."

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 423

I haven't said this before but I've wanted to + now I want to say it all the time:I LOVE YOU.I love you on the page + I love you in the library + in the coffe shop + in the last row of the varsity. I love you here. I love you in negative space--ok, I don't know exactly what that means, but I'm pretty sure it's true-- + I love who you have been + who you'll be. I should say this to you in person, and I'm going to--over + over--but I think I needed to say it here first. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 423

 And there they are: artist and muse, assassin and abettor, two bodies pulled into middle age and beyond, and--most truly--two individuals swallowing their uncertainties, standing and facing each other in underclothes that are in grave need of washing. This is who we are, he thinks, and she nods, even though this time he is certain he has said nothing aloud. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 419

 I keep wishing we could've told her that it was Vaclac, she was in love with Vaclav. And then I remember that it hadn't mattered to her for a long, long time. The love mattered--not the name, not the date, not the facts. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 416 - Filomela's Letter

 I will tell you what matters most... it is love. When you fall in love, friends, let yourself fall. It is my fondest wish that this note finds you both happy, healthy, and falling.

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 411

 He hears the whispers of many thousands of restless souls and discerns the lost woman's voice among them. He listens to her closely, now not even daring to breathe, listens with the most intense concentration he can muster. He charms it upward from the surrounding din, brings it up to his ears until he can make out her words: les caves, les caves, il est dans les caves.

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 407

 At first came the sorts of phrases and images and details and ideas and feelings he has come to expect over the years: orphans and refugees from his forgotten life, and companions from whatever state he'd find himself in at the moment when ink was spilling into the grooves etched by the nib. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 407

 "Is this where I'll sleep?" S. asks. "If you sleep, yes." "What about my old cabin? Below the forecastle?" "That's where I'll be. That's where I've been." "I wrote about you there," S. says. "On the bulkhead. At least, I tried to write about you." "I know." "Can you still read the words?" "No," she says, "but I know them."

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 405

 He wants to sit down at that table, flip the sand glass, and lose himself in a sweet cloud of ink and images--wants it as much as an addict craves his laudanum, his cocaine--

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 394

And the memories? The feeling of being part of a family, the sense-impressions of a child, the minor epiphanies and heartbreaks of a teenager for whom the real world begins to resolve into focus as he spends day after day packing gunpowder into brass casings?... He may not be able to possess those moments, but they are around him, and from time to time they may shine brightly. He can see the stars; he no longer has a need for the constellations. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 388

You can't just leave because I told you my story. It's not fair. Leave later if you want. But please be here now. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 387

 The stairs are uneven, and they creak and groan under his feet as he climbs flight after flight. He ascends slowly, reminding himself to be calm, to conserve energy and focus. (O, for the time when such things were instinctive!)

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 381

We all want to be great--however you define that--and we so often aren't. We're all just in the muck trying to believe we're capable of greatness, but closer to breaking than we want to admit. And we tell ourselves stories--about ourselves, but maybe also all these stories about other people, about characters--as a way to hide from how small we are.

Maybe it's not hiding. Maybe they help us not be so small. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 377

 You can't just whistle and summon sense and order back into your mind. All you can do is button your coat, lace your boots, and trudge though the frigid business of being.

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 376 - Jen's Letter - Pg 3

 He gave me his flashlight, but the batteries died pretty quickly, so for most of that night it was me, alone, in a door factory in a town that wasn't mine, hating my parents and telling myself I wasn't as scared as I knew I was. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 376

 Gradually it dawned on him that no one there was part of anyone else's world. They all occupied the same space but did not occupy it together. Imagine a thousand leaves of tracing paper, each with one person lightly penciled on it, all stacked atop a scene of a frozen city block. A thousand discrete and solitary realities that appear to be occurring in the same location. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 372

You know it wasn't your job to save Griff either, right?

Sometimes. Not always. I'm a little raw right now. Worried I might be losing my shit again. If I am--I don't know--I'm sorry. Sorry, Jen.

Don't apologize. Because then I'll have to apologize for losing mine. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 367

 Really: we imagine ourselves to be so well-contained, so clearly defined, so individually integrious, yet it takes so little to open us up, to send us spilling outward or to introduce something foreign and toxic. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 367

 Emotion breeds mistakes, and words are gifts to the dead, and what begins at the water shall end there and what ends there shall once more begin.

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 352

A joke, really, these people who cannot grasp that there are easier and better ways to make a living than praying a fish will impale itself on your hook, these people whom one cannot help but pity, at least until that pity grows tiresome, at which point one draws one's gun and chases them back to the sad, pointless mudflats of their ancestors. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 350

 Even if he can't stop it--and you can pick your it, the it of ruin in the Territory, the it of campaigns and weapons that turn cities to ash and populations to ghosts, the it of one man's life traded for another man's profit, the it that leaves children without fathers or mothers or homes--his task is to try.

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 342

He paddles and she paddles, and they are close but utterly apart, wordless and faceless to each other, and they paddle this way into the chopping, foaming current, upstream and forever. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 328

Sing to me, Sola, of amour, and may your song pull like a current, carry me through these foaming rapids of blood and ink, for I am a man driven time and again off course. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 327

 His feet on the bristly surface of the dead meadow, his lungs laboring in the altitude, his friends moving and talking and believing and trying to conceal their fear from one another. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 318

 It's not so much the killing that exhausts S. as it is the planning and rowing and trusting and traveling and stalking and killing and escaping and rowing and sewing and sailing and writing and sailing and writing and sailing and writing and planning and rowing and trusting, all the while knowing that Vévoda is hunting him too, that it's just a matter of time. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 306

 He put his shirt back on, uses a sleeve to blot away the blood leaking over his lips, and rejoins the crew on deck, doing his part to keep this patchwork tub above the waves, waiting for his turn to go below and open a vein of ink and spill himself into those pages. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 301

 Yesterday's news? one of the other men says to him. How can you read yesterday's news on a day like today? The man shrugs. I know what happened today. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 296

 What is it that causes him to lose track of his surroundings? Is it the primeval pleasure of expression? The pain of his injuries? The effects of his simultaneously spilling his life onto the page and into a crimson puddle at this feet. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 289

 There's always the question of Sola, the Lady says. It's in the air. It gets into the lungs, and from the lungs into the blood.

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 289

 Aren't you going to ask about Sola? Her question startles him. He doesn't want to admit that Sola had slipped his mind. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 284

 This is where his life--his remade life--has brought him: this weighty knocker in his hand; this door to a shack on the rim of this dead mountain; this mountain on this strange island, this island hidden in these strange seas. Each strange juncture has led to the next and now he is here. He is here, and it is nowhere. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 285

She had Carmina Burana playing--really loudly. She liked to write w/ it on b/c he loved it-- told her several times that it has the truest, most intense expression of passion he'd ever heard--far more so than anything he'd ever written or could ever write. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 284

 The cottage is made of the same weather-bleached wood as the warehouse, though it looks sturdier, its seams tight, it's angles true. The word that runs through S.'s head is intractable: it sits here atop a dead mountaintop on a lifeless island, defying wind and rain and good sense. Push all you like, it seems to say. I am going nowhere.

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 278

 A quarter-mile inland, at roughly the island's geographic center, a monolith of volcanic rock disrupts the gray flatness. It rises a steep thousand feet from the surface, then terminates abruptly in a deep, irregular crater, leaving its peak--an, indeed, the idea of the mountain it used to be--implied in the emptiness above.  Molten black outcroppings extend from its sides like begging arms, ironic mementos of the plant's penchant for cataclysm, its indifference to anything but the eternal rearrangement of itself. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 277

This dream goes on for what feels like forever (O, fickle and variable Time!), ballooning impossibly as they sit there, sit there, sit there, ever in silent anxiety, toothless and still, waiting for something to change--

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 273

During that time the weather darkens, the sky turning into a solid sheet of gray that obscures the sun and the moon and the confused stars alike. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 267

 He pauses along the starboard rail, sees nothing but the broad undulations of waves and the streaked sky. He closes his eyes, feels the breeze washing over his face. He smells salt and varnish and damp canvas, as well as a note of smoke that seems to have taken up permanent residence in his sinuses. He listens to the slaps of the ship pitching over the water, to the flutters and dives of the crew's whistles, to the groaning wood, to the thwacks of sail-edges and stays. After a time, he notices more distant sounds: a rumbly drone wrapped in the fricative static of an ill-tuned wireless. Perhaps, he thinks, this is the sound of time accelerating. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 266 - fn 7

Let the speculation begin about whom Straka used as a model for the pouting sailor. Allow me to prime the pump with a few suggestions: Floris of Bruges! A little British girl! Mary Queen of Scots! Zelda Fitzgerald! Juan Blas Covarrubia's favorite serving-wench on all the Barbary Coast! Grand Duchess Tatiana! The first Mrs. Bouchard!

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 264

He remains vexed by the workings of this strange world. He is uncertain whether he can exercise free will within it. He is unaware of any other role he might play in it. And: he is, by any sensible measure, thoroughly alone. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 236

Far ahead, the market fades into a myopic blur. Even up close the vendors and their wares have soft-looking edges, as if they are held in shape by porous membranes through which the city is seeping, or through which they are seeping into the city. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 227

Did you see today's Daily Pronghorn?

You mean the one w/ the full-page profile of Moody, complete w/ a photograph of him in his office. Pretending to be engrossed in some rare + terribly important document _ actually using his pinky finger to point to some particularly revelatory bit of text while "PH.D. candidate and lead research assistant Ilsa Dirks" stands behind him attempting to express awe. Admiration, and deep understanding simultaneously, all of which adds up to a ridiculous + even offensive pantomime of actual scholarship (and, of course, leaves unraised the once-critical issue of intellectual integrity)? NO. 

But don't you just love his jaunty little cap?

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 221

Relax. Breathe. We'll figure out something.

What can you do? Everyone in the English Dept. hates you, and you're not even allowed to be on campus!!

I can remind you to breathe. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 221

 The rowboat catches the crest of a modest wave, picking up speed and gliding smoothly forward. The feeling, for those seconds, is glorious--it reminds him that he is human, that he is so insignificant as to be utterly free, and he is being guided along gracefully, lovingly, by the hand of Nature--and if trees him, however transiently, from all worry and fear and fury and grief. "I enjoyed that," he says aloud, as much to the stars as to the rower. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 220

 He calls out, "Does this have to do with Sola? Will I see her?" The reply is faint, nearly inaudible, a scratch against the salty night. Y' might, if y' mean to. Although it might have been if yer meant to. The difference feels like a significant one. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 219

 "Artistic integrity is not a guest whom one may choose not to invite to the gala. She must be the first you invite, the first you seat, the first you serve food and wine, the one who calls the orchestra's tunes, the one who is offered her choice of dance partners throughout the night."

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 217

He needs to get off this ship any way he can. He'll be damned if he'll allow himself to sit slack-jawed and vacant-eyed, silencing himself to the delight of a cabin full of monsters who want to claim him as one of their own. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 215

The humming grows louder and louder still--it takes on more distinct pitches--it is the sound of insanity in a scale of more than twelve tones.

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 203 - Eric's Letter - Pg 3

I just couldn't handle it anymore, I couldn't be on the boat w/o thinking that it was a thin barrier b/w me + the bottom of the ocean. Every moment I was awake--which was nearly always--I was convinced I was about to die. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 199

 He gulps a breath and dives, just as more bullets throw spray around him--dives, and strokes and kicks, because he has decided he will make it around that point, out of the line of fire, onto a rock or a pebbly shore, any safe place where he can pull himself out and rest and maybe weep and then figure out what in hell he's supposed to do next. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 195

The best time I had in college was the time my roommate Griff + I road-tripped to San Francisco right before exam week. There was a baseball game he wanted to see, so we drove like hell all night + morning to get there, saw the game, turned right around + drove like hell all night. Got back just in time for Monday morning exams. It felt so good to say, no, we're not going to study, we're going to do this ridiculous, pointless trip instead. And we aced our exams anyway. So we acted like that was proof that we were total academic bad-asses.

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 193

 The two of them, blind, feeling their way along water-slick walls.
 And then a new sound: a soft, bassy rumble.
 "I'm right here," he says.
 "I am, too," she says. 

I'm right here.

I am, too.

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 190

A stream of water runs down one side of the hole, drizzling down into the dark. S. finds himself irritated by how effortlessly water finds the place it belongs. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 182

 With each noteworthy even that transpired on the sunlit surface, the K-----'s illustrators had to push deeper into the dark to chronicle it. Is that striking irony, or the opposite--an inexorable truth about the act of writing history? 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 178

 Then, the passage opens into a huge, half-moon-shaped amphitheater, with an elevated slab altar and all three hundred sixty degrees of wall covered in a kaleidoscopic swirl of images (which, even with the briefest of glimpses in the shaky light of a running man's lantern, is easily recognized as a creation myth, an epic clash between bird-figures of the skies and wolf-figures of the earth, the figures collectively twisting and curling around one another, diving and tumbling and bursting into one ultimate frame of harmony and grave directly above the altar: one humanoid figure with a crown of feathers and a vulpine tail, balanced on one leg at the needle-tip top of a mountain peak, surrounded by sheer drops and sky--a precarious position, to be sure, but the figure's face expresses only serenity, no fear, no apprehension). 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 177

 Outside, the vulture circles, somehow unfazed by the fusillade of bullets, one of which scorched the edge of a tail feather. It circles and circles, tipping this way and that, snapping its wings as it encounters a cool downdraft, tipping and flapping and circling, on and ever on. Whether it is brave or ignorant or simply incapable of choosing to do anything else, we can only surmise. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 167

While you're gone, I'm going to play around with the codes we haven't gotten yet.

Why did I write that? You can't respond anytime soon.

Guess I've gotten to the point where this is comforting, even if I'm just talking to myself. Should I be worried?

Why, yes, Jen. You probably should be. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 165

His question is no longer whether she knows him but how and to what extent, not whether they are important to each other but why. Unless, of course, none of it is true, if those images in his dream are not fragments of memory but something else: the scattered and half-formed ink-shapes of his mind's desperate attempt to author a self, which are not to be trusted. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 158

More ambiguous use of bird detail.

Note though, they're not comforting, but they're not making things worse. They're attracted, but keeping distance. (Good sense, maybe.)

Sensible vultures.

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 143

Pine Marten is one of the heroes of "White Oak." I loved these stories when I was a kid. Didn't you?

Always  found them condescending and pedantic.

You don't get invited to many parties, do you?

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 137

Corbeau releases his hand and swings her arms freely as she walks. Truth be told, S. is disappointed; it was only a pretense--he'd never thought otherwise--but he'd been enjoying the feel of her hand in his, the comfort of togetherness even without the slightest tinge of romance. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 134

 It's not that S. finds the silence itself uncomfortable--he spent enough time with only his own company on the ship--but it feels wrong to him to be this close to someone, especially someone whom he can trust, and to waste the opportunity for interaction. "Have you and Stenfalk been together a long time?" S. asks. It's a clumsy question, delivered haltingly, but at least they are words and he has offered them to her. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 133

 "That's why people like Vévoda always have the advantage, you know," Corbeau says, rubbing her nose. "Over people like us. Because we're cursed with the belief that people matter. It's much, much easier to bend the world to your will if bending the world is what matters most to you."

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 125

 A blessing of his amnesia: he has no knowledge of any connections to others, and thus no connections to fear breaking, no connections to repair once broken, no connections to be grieved once they are lost. How fortunate, to be impervious to such thing, to be ignorant of anyone else's feelings of loss that might involve him.

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 125

 For an extended moment they fall into a quiet, sad inertia, until Stenfalk claps his hands and declares that there's no time to waste, no time for regret or emotion or any such extravagances. What matters is surviving, escaping, and then, with the safety of distance, making the world understand. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 123

 Doubt is filling Zapadi's decrepit house, weighing down the air around them. Doubt is tipping the foundation, causing beams and joists to wail with stress, bowing the windows in their frames. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 118

No one speaks, but S. can feel the silence between them evolving as they each read through the newspaper's characterization of the events of the night, which lays all of the blame on the demonstrators in general, and on them--the five people hiding in this dusty house, drinking a dead man's tea, one of them even wearing the dead man's boots. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 109

Well the book's still here. So I guess you've left. And I'm talking to myself in the margins of a stranger's book. Awesome.

Be safe, Eric.

I love that you kept writing. 

What else was I going to do?

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 108

He hears Corbeau's heavy breaths behind them--and it's funny, her breaths are astonishingly attractive to him, how seductive the sound of living can be!

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 106

Two people, just two, boy and girl, their newly-adult figures long and lean, as if their bodies each have been stretching themselves toward futures of limitless promise. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 102

 And he turns around, guesses at the most direct route to the wharf, and sprints back over the rough macadam. He does not ask his depleted body if it is capable of such exertion, he simply runs, allows gravity to draw him back downhill because he has to. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 86

Hello, Rain. I see you've met my parade. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 83

It's not obvious?

No, it's not.

JEN: I LIKE YOU.

Even though you don't know anything about me...

I know the you who's in the margins. I know you're thinking hard about what you want + why--more than some people ever do. I know you can take on a challenge + kick it's ass. And I know you've tried harder to understand me than anyone has in a long time. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 77

 Find a place to sleep. Find food. A cheap rooming-house, perhaps. Get rest, so the world can start to make sense again. Survive the night. Then, maybe, find a paper and pen. Write down what you know, and what you suspect, about yourself--even if that won't yet fill a single page. And then, maybe then, start piecing together who you are. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 71

 He became aware that his mind was entertaining two utterly contradictory impulses at once, and in the pause that came with this revelation, a third thought offered itself with a quiet clarity: that if only he could rest, gather his strength, he could figure out which of those positions was truer to the person he was, and he could choose what to do instead of simply doing it. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 65

 S. lets the impact carry him up, up, into the blinding churn of foam and rope and splinter and scream, and he himself is sailing, sailing until the raging sea rushes to meet him. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 64

 Time slows, allowing him a thought, a strange, wordless association of color and shape: the waterspout and the drink in the young woman's glass. Then a collapse into singular doom: pressure punches his ears; black fills all the space above him; his limbs loosen with a warm readiness for death. He may or may not scream, he won't recall, but there is a tremendous crash. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 62

He looks out at the western sky, and so much happens so quickly then that S. can scarcely note it at all, and he will have difficulty keeping track of its sequence. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 51

 I don't really know you at all, so there's no way I could ever know if you're changing, or if you've already changed.

You know me a little, right? There was a time when people relied on letters to get to know each other.

OBSERVATION: These are not those times.

Of course they are.

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 48

Drops his head into his hands. Breathes deeply. Prepares to pass through a world he cannot possibly understand. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 47 - fn 4

"What if the constellations no longer held?" he asked. "Would it not cause one to scrutinize the totality of one's surroundings carefully? Would it not terrify?" 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 47

 He watches the stars closely. They wink, they tremble, and he swears he can see them drift--as one might be able to see the minute hand of a clock moving. He is a man without a past sailing in a strange sea in a world where the stars have come loose in the firmament.

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 46

 When he looks back up to the sky, it's as if the stars have shifted; he can still make out the constellations, but their shapes are different. The stars that made the eagle's wing-tips have spread out over the sky, leaving the bird unfinished, eternally spilling itself out into the black. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 46

I'm on a total short fuse. Everyone + everything is on the verge of pissing me off hugely all the time. 

I assume I'm one of them.

Less than you'd think. It's mostly people in the real world.

...As opposed to the margin world. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 43

 The last thing a man without memories needs is terrible new ones. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 34

 He--this alleged S.-- has no control over who or where or why he is. He feels as if he is falling again, falling through the dark, with nothing to believe in but the cruel efficiency of gravity.

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 30

His only option, it seems, is to hurl himself into the waves and put his faith in water. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 22

 She reaches for her drink--a vein of dark liquid in a tall, narrow glass--and sips thoughtfully. Something about her in this moment strikes him as being familiar. The motion of her arm? The shape of her hand? The wrinkle of her upper lip? He does not know. Nor does he have any way to tell whether what he is sensing is a fragment of memory, a fragment of the idea of a memory, or something his mind, desperate for connections, has created on its own. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 20

 "May I sit?" "You're awfully wet." "I know," he says. "It appears to be my most salient characteristic." "Surely there's more to you than that. You must be someone when you're dry." "I can't remember the last time I was dry."

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 17

 She appears to enjoy her public solitude; there is an easy grace in her square-shouldered posture and the neatness of her attire (a finely-tailored dress of emerald green), in the unhurried manner with which she turns a page, in the way she lays a finger over her lips and stares off, right through the commotion, presumably contemplating a line she has just read. Comfortable alone and easily overlooked. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 16

 At a table along the far wall sits a young woman of no more than twenty, alone. She is reading a book--a large volume, as this as Don Quixote--in the light from a sconce on the wall behind her, as if this chaotic, drunken hovel were a library. She reads with one elbow on the table, her thumb cradling her chin, one finger resting thoughtfully over her lips. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 9

Here, around him, the street is deserted, quiet but for the rain's soft patter, so quiet that he imagines he can hear the whispering voices of people who have met their ends in this place where river meets sea. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 9

The owner and the organ-grinder part with a handshake that both conceals and codifies their mutual distrust, and the man in the dark overcoat disappears around another corner, leaving these two to their commerce of song, coin, and bone, with his soles squishing softly on the stone and the sky darkening into true night. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 6

A mystery to himself, he has only three connections to an earlier life. One is in his coat pocket: a sludge of ink-stained paper on which he believes something important was once written, though all he can make out clearly is an ornate S-shaped symbol. Another is in his trouser pocket: a tiny black orb that might be a pebble, or perhaps a piece of ancient and petrified fruit. The third runs through every cell in his body: a vague but terrifying sense-memory of falling from a great height. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 5

It felt like it was the biggest, dumbest risk I'd ever taken.

It probably was.

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 4

He does not know whether he has ever been here before. He does not know why he is here now.

And I don't know why I'm scribbling in a book with a stranger.

Well, you said you like mysteries. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg x

I care about the artistry of his words and the passion of his convictions. I feel no urge to identify him because I knew him. I saw the world through the eyes of his characters... His mysteries, his secrets, his mistakes? These are not, have never been, and will never be, my concern.