We admit the presence of no author, no oeuvre, and no genre. The text stands bare. . . . We admit nothing outside of the text. - Jonathan Lethem

The cars rushing below knew nothing. People in cars weren't New Yorkers anyway, they'd suffered some basic misunderstanding. The two boys on the walkway, apparently standing still they were moving faster than the cars.
Nineteen seventy-five.

In fact, I hated Loomis — let me count the ways. His imprecision and laziness maddened my compulsive instincts — his patchiness, the way even his speech was riddled with drop-outs and glitches like a worn cassette, the way his leaden senses refused the world, his attention like a pinball rolling past unlit blinkers and frozen flippers into the hole again and again: game over . He was permanently impressed by the most irrelevant banalities and impossible to impress with real novelty, meaning, or conflict.

The clouds were still bunched up in the sky like a gang on a street corner, and it looked to me like they had the sun pretty effectively intimidated.