I gained an insight, a purloined-letter kind of thing. - Jonathan Lethem

Or were they bound in slow-cooking love-hate, a folie à deux obscure to anyone outside their secret system?

Despite their authoritarian light show, those ice-cream trucks of death couldn't do any more for Perkus's murdered infatuation, his crushed crush, than could keening Greek chorus, or a moaning witch doctor.

That's the way it has to be for you. You'll always be living in an FSR."
"FSR?"
"Finite Subjective Reality. That's what I call it. I ought to copyright that, in fact. You go creating a little area of control around you, until you bump into the next guy with his. A little sphere of reality and unreality, sanity and insanity, whatever you pull together. There's no hope of sorting it out. That's the way you live. FSR.