I'd underestimated him. I assumed anyone who started out gut-punching you in an elevator couldn't have all that much else in his arsenal. For instanc… - Jonathan Lethem

Her presence was sturdy and watery at once, arms weirdly muscled, nipples like small tongues riding on the mercurial flesh that glided on his surface, thighs smooth to where his fingers plummeted inside, followed by the rest of him. The golf-ball cyst swam too, faintly present against him, a feature, not a bug. Tira, for all her usual chatter, wasn’t a screamer or even a moaner. In the silence their breaths fell into concert with the whining Murphy springs. Bruno’s mind felt poured into hers as well, at least conveyed a great distance out of his body.

Insomnia is a variant of Tourette's — the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance — as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off.

on the one hand there’s mansplaining, and on the other, there’s the sound of a woman quoting the mansplaining to another woman.